Adding thickness to the armor.

Now that we have a skeleton of the shape that we need let talk about the process of adding thickness and strength to the form.   

This process has be slightly modified from the good people at Gijuku who have been nice enough to teach me this style.   They have there own site but the English is understandably poor.  I will try to represent there style as faithfully as possible. 

In the Finjuku style they use layers of construction paper glued to the form in whole sheets.  When done properly it gives the armour a very smooth coat that needs very little sanding in the latter steps.   It is my experience that this is nearly impossible for me to do.  So I modified there style,  I use a more conventional (American) style of coating paper in plaster and laying strips over the form to get the thickness.    The amount of plaster to paper is trial and error and I have never been able to get a "formula" that works all the time.   

I sugjest that you only place one layer of plaster on at a time and then let the piece dry over night.   The more you layers you put on at a time the more stress is put on the original frame due to the water in the wet plaster.  Another disadvantage of placing multible layers at the same time is the warping that occurs during drying process.  the more layers the more the plaster warps during drying. Take your time.     

Be sure that you place paper on both sides of the cardboard.

Once you are done the pieces will look like above.

Note!

Don't try to get the cardboard to bend any more my using the paper as a curving tool it will only crack and break.

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