For Cardiff Film and Comic Con, Andy and I decided to make full foam armour sets, and I thought that Gordon Freeman’s HEV suit from Half Life would be an amazing piece to do, so that’s just what I did.

To start with, I downloaded the Pepakura template (currently available here) and constructed it to test the fit and get a good look at the structure.

It fit nicely first time through, which was good.

Next, I started to cut corresponding pieces out of 14mm foam floor tiles that I got from Argos and hot glue it all together into place.

I used quite a lot of hot glue at this point because I wanted to make sure the joins were really strong.

As I built the strap around the waist, I added a couple of strips of velcro to hold it around me and so that I could open up the armour sufficiently to get into and out of it.

It’s at this point that I enlisted the help of Andy and some of his foam-work expertise.

Andy: “Because Peter had used a lot of hot glue to ensure the strength of the joins, a fair bit of glue had seeped out of the edges, so the first thing that I did was smooth them down with a dremel to remove what excess I could. Then, I came up with a trick that I felt was quite neat: heat up the glue with a hair dryer and smooth it down with a butter knife.

Because the butter knife got hot due to the hair dryer, the glue didn’t really stick to it that much, meaning that you could use it almost like Polyfilla, filling the gaps as much as possible.”

Andy: “After I had the joins as smooth as possible (finishing them off with some sandpaper), we moved on to sealing the foam using my usual method: 50/50 water and PVA glue in a spray bottle coating it once and leaving it to dry, then repeat, then on the third coat use 100% PVA straight from the put and apply with a paintbrush. Once this layer has dried, repeat the whole three stage process: spray, spray, paint.”

Andy: “You can then repeat a third time, or leave it there if you think it’s sealed enough. You’ll know when it’s done if the foam is nice and shiny.

Either way, I recommend leave it overnight to dry completely before attacking with any paint. Sealing is an important process, so don’t rush it.”

Before leaving it for the night, we tested the way it looked with the biceps and gauntlets which we’d made from the same 14mm foam tiles whilst waiting for the glue to dry, and as you can see, it was really starting to take shape.

The next day, I put two coats of white primer down over the whole chest plate. It’s a simple process, just remember to use long clean lines to prevent paint clumping and to get a smooth finish.





Once that was properly dried, I painted the base coat of Peugeot Iron Grey, and after that had dried, masked off the areas that needed to be orange, and then put down the primary colour of Vauxhall Brilliant Orange. As you can probably tell by their names, both of these cans of spray paint are intended for cars, and available at most big car stores (these were from Halfords)

Pretty obvious what it is at this point.

The one thing that needed altering was the emblem on the chest plate, which had to be yellow. Spray painting that thing alone would have been a ball-ache, so I painted it by hand with a brilliant yellow acrylic.

Once the emblem had dried, it was time to try on the finished breastplate. There are a couple of areas low on the piece where we still needed to add some velcro straps to ensure that the edges lined up properly and it all fastened up as intended, but as you can see it looked really good.

I’m going to leave this post for now, but later I’ll write a second later detailing the rest of the gauntlets, the legs and the all important crowbar.