Obelix belt, arm braces and vest

It is time for the last of the accessories of Obelix. These accessories is what makes my version of Obelix closer to the 1999 film version than the comic. There are several reasons why I chose to go after the film version, but one is that it is a lot easier to recreate something that has actually been made for real and not just tought up by the creator of the comic. The belt is definitely a lot easier.

Gerald Depardieu as Obelix in 1999

For the base of the belt I used cotton canvas. On top of that I used EVA foam, 5 mm. The foam part is in three sections, which helps with the bending of the belt when I wear it. I glued the foam to the canvas, but I didn't trust just the glue so I used cotton string to sew through both the foam and the canvas. I also added some extra stitches that would later be hidden by the ornaments.

The back of the belt, it's closed in the back with velcro

The ornaments are round circles of foam. The middle one is larger than the two side ones. To build up some height I made the circles with one base and then an outer ring in the same foam, the  middle cirlce also has a centre and it's built up a bit extra with foam clay as well, also to give it a more natural and irregular look. 

The front of the belt with the base circles.

The belt was painted with brown flexpaint. It was the first time that I worked with flexpaint and it has both good qualities and some worse qualities. The bad is that it's very thin and the colour that I though I had ordered (brown) was more of a beige. It was ok, but a friend who ordered green flexpaint got a paint that was more of a deep turquoise. It's also very thin, so you need to add many layers before it gets a good coverage, this also makes it hard to hide brush strokes. I didn't mind that my belt ended up a bit uneven, since it's supposed to be leather, but it is a lot harder if you wanta perfect finish. The flex paint also stays sticky, you need to cover it with either a special lacquer (I used that) or something else (there are tutorials out there on the web).

There are a lot of things with flexpaint though. The main thing is that it's flexible. You can bend the foam as much as you like, and it doesn't crack in any way. You can also mix in a lot of other acrylic paints to get the exact colour that you want. In the belt I mixed in a lot of acrylic paints in the colours burnt umber and ivory black. My friend who got the turquoise green was able to get a proper green by adding a lot of yellow paint to it. You also don't need to prepare the foam in anyway or with any kind of primer. The flexpaint is its own primer so it's just to start painting with it.

The centre roundel

The roundels were spraypainted gold and then glued with contact cement to the main belt.

The finished belt

Just two days before Närcon I decided to also do the pair of armbraces. This was a fun project, that in the end only took an evening, and then I was sooooo satisfied with them.

I cut out a general pattern in paper, and then in canvas, and finally in foam. This time I used 2 mm foam. The roundel is made of one layer of foam with an inner circle and a ban of foam that I just glued around the edge. The surface markings of the brace is made by heating the foam with a heatgun and then pressing aluminium foil into it, this gives it much more of a creased leather effect. I had run out of burnt umber, but thankfully the colour of the braces are different to the belt so I managed to get something close to it by mixing some other browns that  had. The roundels in the original also don't have the same metallic apperance as on the belt, and since they would have to be flexible I mixed the brown flexpaint with acrylic gold paint. I loved this result, it definitely looks liked golden leather, and I'm not curious on what other projects I can do to get this colour. I also painted the canvas with the same golden brown colour.

The finished belt and braces, one open andone closed

The last piece of the costume is actually the piece that I finished first, and it's his vest. I used a longhaired fake fur and just cut out a general shape for the back and the fronts. The only seams are at the sides and shoulders. Once it was finished I cut it to the length that I wanted to have. In hindsight I should have kept it longer in the back, to act as a cushion for the metal back pack that I carried the menhir in.

And with that I was finished with the whole Obelix project. It was fun and for me it was the first time that I worked for real in materials like EVA foam and styrofoam, and that was pretty fun as well. I still prefer working with fabric, but I can definitely see me working with more EVA foam in the future if it's needed.

(The flask on my side is filled with water not magic potion.)