Frock Chick

There was a little query as to whether the costumes really were leather and these insane hi res images confirm it 🙂 I’ve seen most of these promos before but these are in such high quality they need to be seen in full 🙂 No new images for other amazons but for the royal family it’s fantastic!

http://getyourcomicon.co.uk/news/45-new-wonder-woman-photos-released/

So for Hippolyta I grabbed a few details to explore the cutting of the leather.

First here are two egde treatments. The gold painted leather has been cleanly cut with potentially a swivel knife. The inner bronze toned edge has been cut and then an edge beveler used to cut the edge on a 45 degree angle. This appears to have had no further treatment before the paint and sealer. It also appears to cut into a tooled design right on the edge. This tooling can be seen on the edges of the gold as well.

There is also a fantatsic use of texture tools! The body of each piece has a scattered stone texture. It could even be replicated using a piece of scoria in place of a standard tool (especially on a foam based project.) For my Leia Barge Bikini I made my own texture tool for clay by taking impressions of different rocks in polymer clay and baking them. I still have them and used them on my Turian sculpt!

For leather metal tools offer best practice and safety. While damp (not soaking) tooling leather will take an impression even of fingernails but can be unpredictable based on individuals. It may even be possible to lay the damp leather over a rocky surface face down and a small amount of pressure from behind will suffice.

There are so many different edge treatments in this small section that I had to number them.

1- clean cut edge, possibly a little  sanding once painted and sealed- not the slightly paler section towards the bottom left of that same piece.

2- clean cut then very lightly edge beveled. This is much more subtle than the waist section in the previous photo. This was done before dyeing and sealing as the colour is rich right through the edge.

3- clean cut edge with a tool mark! As mentioned the leather is very easy mark when tooling and this looks like the edge of the swivel knife went beyond the cut. But there are a few other similar marks further up the edge so it may be intentional to match the hand creafted effect.

4- clean cut then another use of the edge beveler. Slightly heavier and definitely done before the gold paint and sealer. The tooled edge also looks like a simple stop or border stamp but I haven’t been able to identify which.

5- zig zag join! The skirt panels are so long as to need to be pieced. This appears to be a waxed/coated thread.

6- the skirt leather is laminated to what looks like the same textured leather. The cut edges go right through the pattern so it is likely these were hides that had been textured and treated before they were used. It is possible to find hide with a pattern like this with belly scale patterns, it will be difficult to get an exact match (working backwards through makers for the production can often lead back to suppliers of materials.)

7- the lamination continues on the belt hanging panel. The designs are tiled on a support leather that is of similar density.

8- the belt appears to be a mix of leather with a cast centre design. It is possible the belt and the chest plate are cast from originals that were made from leather. It seems unlikely that the department responsible for working the leather would share tools with the props department but it is possible to treat and cast from an existing piece. This is all speculation on my part based on having worked on long running tv series here and straight up being nosey! And I was very lucky to have been allowed to see behind the scenes at Weta when they had a quiet moment many years ago.

I would suggest that if the same tools used for leather were to be used on clay for sculpting that a layer of plastic such as used for sandwhich bags is used between to soften the edges. Or careful use of a primer and buffing to soften edges before molding.

Final note, her battle cloak is a suede or faux swede as opposed to the boiled wool of her cloak used elsewhere.

Now this I am going to make. I have the boot base…

Meanwhile there are 54 Amazons aside from the royal family to organise into folders (some with character names some I need to watch carefully for in the end credits) so I am going to take a break and make some skirt diagrams for different measurements for handouts on Saturday.

My sincerest thanks to all the amazons who have shared their photos of their experiences on set. It is truly inspiring and very much appreciated The Amazons mean so much to so many, so thank you.

My previous post separated the three types of armour worn by the bulk of the Amazon Army. This post is to try and describe the different elements of the skirts, as well as can be observed.

These are my my own observations, I look forward to being proved wrong by the Art book!

This screengrab of the featurette shows that the three types of armour observed are indeed a deliberate choice. The Queen’s Guard ensemble just obscured is yet another type and there are a few similarities in terms of layers and construction.

Skirts

The skirt straps are woven leather made in one piece with the lower layer of groin protection. This suggests the horizontal straps are shaped to fit the curve of hips. This also suggests the skirts close in the back or side. I have used arrows to indicate where to spot this feature in the following.

(@aliciavelabailey @brookeence @jennypacey🙂

(via @maylingng🙂

The following photo snippets show the leather straps are a vege tanned leather dyed and weathered. The ends flare slowly then taper to a jagged point. The original colour of the leather can be seen on the inner waist of the first photo. This also shows the hide is fairly thick and the woven sections to appear to be flattened (malleted while wet?)

The woven section is 4-5 rows deep below the line of the belt with between 1-2  rows behind the belt. The vertical straps seem to number about 28. To get to this number there appear to be 4-5 each side front. Assuming a similar number at the back and assuming a similar number match at the back as appear to be missing from the front. The straps appear to be close to an inch across at the top widening to 2 1/2″ at the bottom. This is a very rough estimation based on average distance between knuckles on a thumb.

The surface is semi gloss suggesting standard finishing techniques with a sealer/oils.

The first image below is from the background of a photo by @jadevlewis the next two are from the side of a photo by @yoga_ballroomgirl

The skirt and belts are stored on different kinds of coathangers and this offers a chance to determine where the join in the skirt section is. The middle photo apparently shows a skirt draped over a coathanger so that the centre front is to our right while the centre back is to our left. To support this theory we need to look at the silvery tinted hip level belt.

The hip level belt appears to be cast so that the plates are semi-rigid and the gaps between offer  more flex (this may affected somewhat due to being mounted to the very dense woven skirts) The belt plaques appear to be about as dense and flexible as leather of a similar weight.

The pattern of shapes appears to be symmetric and follow this order:

Inverted decorated inverted V (/\) at centre front then a rhomoid (/_/) then a trapezoid (/_\), another rhomboid, an irregular pentagon that is longer than the rest of the plaques, and finally a narrow rectangle shape that is used for lacing (three holes per side.) There is a gap that is able to be seen even in group shots. The following is from a behind the scenes featurette.

This also shows a blurred section that follows the same line in the strapping skirts. I have not been able to find a higher resolution however the above clearly shows the straps are interrupted as they do not line up from one side to the other. I cannot make out the method of joining but any lacing holes appear to be filled with a thong or cord that matches tonally and completely obscures them.

There are V shaped belts on the left side of the skirts. These appear to be a different leather to the skirts and is a more yellow tinted brown. There are variations in this piece as some are worn alone while most have either a matching piece on the right or a second V shaped belt with snake scale/fish scale plate over the top (the direction is towards the pointed end of the belts.)

The groin protection follows two distinct types. The first is a simple layer of matching leather following much the same shape as the lower layer with concentric rings of thing strips of leather woven through. The pattern can be easily observed in the photos at the top of this post.

The second type is very complex and several layers thick. The first layer appears to be the piece of leather that is continuous with the strapping skirts. It appears to be split vertically through the centre. It is not possible to tell as of yet whether this split extends to the top edge.

The following photo attempts to show the additional layers through use of colours.

Via @yoga_ballroomgirl

The top two layers of Y (inverted) and W shapes are indicated in pink and purple- these appear to wrap around to the back in photos from the side but it is difficult to ascertain where these wrap to. There is another Y (inverted) shape as indicated in blue that also seems to wrap behind. There are two vertical strips to the outer edges indicated in green. The next layer is indicated in yellow and is of three gently flared sections. The final layer which I believe to be continuous with the strapping is obscured in this photo but can be easily seen in the photos of Mayling Ng in the previous sections.