Fun time. I had taken all of my pattern shapes that I have printed up for the armor portion of the suit and spray glued each piece to black craft foam. After they dried, I used a plain old scissor and cut out each piece. The great thing about the adhesive I used was that when I was done cutting them out, the paper pattern came right off leaving me a perfectly clean cutout.
I then proceeded to spray each piece with silver spray paint. Creatively, I wanted to leave some portions black so I used blue painter’s tape to tape off those areas. I noticed from a bunch of other sites on this matter that people are saying that paint will not hold onto this type of craft foam. I have not had that problem. I can even bend the pieces without it flaking.
I then places the dried armor pieces onto my original patterns to see how they line up. Looks good so far.
Next, we are going to adhere them to the vest. You have one shot at this so be careful. You don’t want to mess up all the work you put into the vest. Best thing to do at this point is to place the pieces onto the vest as a “dry fit” Then take a Sharpies and trace around each one. I liked using black so that if I moved the pieces a bit, you would hardly notice the outlines. Now go ahead and glue ‘em down. This is what I came up with! Pretty cool!
Next I hand painted the Joe logo onto the chest.
I printed out the logo, put blue painter’s tape onto a self-healing mat, placed the print on top of the tape and used a blade to carefully cut out a negative of the logo. I carefully removed the tape and placed it where I wanted it onto the chest. Then I covered the rest of the vest with plastic leaving the logo cutout alone. Then spray painted the logo with black spray paint that I had lying around. After it was dry I pulled off the tape and did touch-ups wherever necessary. Here is what it looks like.
And another look at the back. (Just because it is cool looking)
*All patterns are for sale. Please contact me for more information.
