Prop Work [An Intermission of Sorts]

I'm taking a break with sewing Alice's coat for now. I decided to help work on my boyfriend's prop for his costume. This prop is actually a 6 foot tall sword made out plywood that is 3/4" inch thick. Initially we made the original design as a cardboard cut out to help create the dimensions. I transferred the design from a reference photo, like the one shown below, onto the life-sized piece of cardboard.

This is Decus from Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World. The prop I'm working on is that gigantic sword.

This is Decus' sword from another angle.

 Then after the cardboard replica was finished, we used it as an outline to trace onto the plywood. This was where things started to get complicated. After the outline was created, I added the inner details of the sword to the plywood. In order to get the actual sword cut out of the wood we had to use several tools including a dremel and hacksaw to get the wood pieces out evenly. Basically we extracted the pieces surrounding the sword out by cubed sections.



After all the wood was cut, next we had to color the replica sword. We used a silver spray paint as a base coat. After it was dry we applied black foam to create a raised effect to the sword like in the reference picture. The golden arm bone and finger bones were added last after being spray painted gold. The skull portion of the sword we had to get very creative with: we found a similar sized skull at a party store, cut it in half, and glued it to the front and back of the sword. For the skull's eyes blue gems found at a craft store were inserted into the skull's eye sockets. Lastly the handle was created as realistically as possible, by using a length of PVC piping, foam filler inside it to keep it sturdy, and a cap at the end.

This is a pic of the sword without the skull added. It's taller than me!

And that's all there is to making the sword!