You got a tease of the paint on the armor before, and if you’re like I was, once you saw the first color coat go on, you were eager to see the final result. Anyway, I have the spaulders complete, including final paint.
Right spaulder – Mafia means family
Remember that each of the supplemental armor pieces was meant to tell a bit of a story. This one is a bit convoluted. Way back in college an episode of The Simpsons came out. One of their Halloween specials. In the intro Mr. Burns puts out “the” decoration. A little red bat named “Batsy.” After circumstances lead to the demise of the Simpson family, Mr. Burns attributes it to Batsy, though he seemingly didn’t do anything. Or did he? The sequence ends with the crappy looking, little, red bat coming to life and flying away.
For one reason or another, I decided that was as close to a deity as I needed to see. There are more steps to the story, but eventually Batsy became not just a “god” but a football god. My sister, my friend, and I who have attended games together (I mainly mooch off of them) for forever have now taken to pleading with Batsy when the Bills need something big and/or praising Batsy when the something big happens. The right spaulder is my tribute to Batsy and my immediate football family. There was a reason I chose a red bat to practice things several chapters ago.
One of the reasons I didn’t cheap out on my painter’s tape was because I knew I was going to be doing some hand stenciling. How did I get this little guy on the spaulder?
Frog tape! The first picture is me marking off how much space I have to work with. The second is my free-hand drawing of Batsy, and the third is after I cut it out with a razor knife. Now, you do still need to worry about the paint already on the item you’re putting your stencil on, so before anything else, I made the tape less tacky by placing it on my couch a few times. Anyway, Batsy needed a face and some lines in his wings…
Now you might say that this looks kinda crappy, and you’d be right. Batsy by default looks a bit crappy and I wanted that to come through. It’s part of the joke. He’s crooked you might say. Yes he is! He’s taking flight! He’s supposed to be crooked. There’s a thumb print where you must have gotten paint on your hand. Ah, crap. To be fair, my hands got a lot of paint on them.
How in the world did THAT happen? It’s common to get a little paint on your fingertip with a spray can but this is ridiculous, right? I needed something more than Batsy on this so I took matters into my own hands. My fingertips really.
That entire border is made of fingerprints. I figured lean into the Halloween vibe a bit and thought this would be cool. This is before I made it wearable, so there’s one more embellishment you’ll see in a few moments. But first…
Left spaulder – Buffalo Polish
My actual name isn’t a closely guarded secret and my last name is preeeeetty Polish. My dad grew up Buffalo Polish and I grew up with a Dom Polski club as a lingering part of that tradition. I won’t lay claim to being “very Polish” all things considered, but it’s a part of me and my story. I already showed you the left spaulder and it’s haute-piece. The intended design element for this one was to borrow from medieval armor, much like the Japanese-armor inspired tasset.
You might remember I painted the base color red, a striking contrast from the base blue of nearly everything else. In fact, it’s the only item that will feature ZERO blue paint. If you’re also of Buffalo Polish heritage you likely know the Polish flag is red and white. It’s got a bird on it. What type of bird? A white-tailed eagle! Time to get to work.
Okay, you’re hard at work Skare. On what? I’m introducing a new plastic type. Type 7. What’s type 7? It depends apparently. This is from a Frank’s Red Hot jug (notice the 1/2 marking). It’s flexible, multiple layers apparently, and way different to work with than polypropylene. That still doesn’t explain what I’m making though. That center line I’ve drawn on is the area I WON’T be scoring with my X-Acto chisel. Yeah, but that still isn’t telling us what you’re making Skare.
Feathers! Tail feathers. They’re not yet white-tailed eagle feathers though. A can of spray paint can fix that though.
Here they are! My white-tailed eagle feathers on the medieval-ish left spaulder. A quick detour. You might have started noticing mechanical attachments that aren’t your typical rivets. When I was trying to make the armor wearable, I had made small washers from the polypropylene to attach elastic straps and well, the rivets ripped through the washers. So I bought Chicago screws, aka “screw rivets.” They did the same job, allowed me to dial in the torque, and they look awesome.
Back on track, I said I wanted Polish inspiration. Many regions of the world developed scale armor. Overlapping pieces of metal attached to something underneath it. Polish scale armor, called “karacena” is notable for using rivets rather than the more common wire or thread. Karacena was also less protective than plate armor available at the time and was often worn by nobility (since they’d hit the front lines less) or as ceremonial armor. Mine, lorewise mind you, is over beskar plate so being decorative is surely not an issue.
Like I did with the tassets, I wanted to make sure the pair looked good together, so here’s a look at the side-by-side.
Two final thoughts. Like the Zubaz print tasset, I wanted the Batsy piece not to look so flat, so I added a strip of extra “beskar” to look reinforced. Finally, I did a bunch of test runs on the feather design and was not happy with any of them. Even the final design. I was quite confident I had over-committed to the left spaulder design and was going to wind up with a piece of armor I hated.
Then it hit me. A single feather might look unsatisfactory, but perhaps layered they’d start to look more like what I wanted. I think I proved myself wrong. I don’t hate that armor piece at all. In fact, I love how it came out. Praise Batsy!
