You may not be a fan of Daft Punk, but if you’re a follower of internet culture, then the type of costume designs they use are probably something you’ve seen in many internet videos or something along those lines. One of the more popular looks in the collection would have to be the Daft Punk metallic hand plates, such as this homemade version.
This retro design by Harrison Krix of Volpin Props is pretty cool, and looks very real. So much so that you wouldn’t believe that it isn’t actually made of metal plating. In fact, the actual plates are made of styrene plastics with metallic paints.
The design begins with a scaled model of the hands that he’s going to use for the plates; in this case, it’s his hands.
Basically, to get an actual shape and size for the plates from the scaled down blueprints, he made copies of his hands in alginate, which is a great material for one-time use life casting. It’s not quite a plaster, and resembles a ballistics gel which is used for its human flesh consistency.
After molding the pair of hands, the plating for the gloves begins.
For this set, only the back plates were sculpted for each hand, and the finger plates were just made using one hand. These vacuum form masters were formed with apoxie sculpt.
Basically, each of these pieces were separated and ultimately sanded down so that all that would remain is the masters themselves, which would be molded and set in styrene plastic, then sanded, trimmed, and smoothed.
So far so good. The design already looks pretty cool. After finishing off with chrome spray, the plates look good to go. Over all, this is a really easy to do project, given that you have the materials and the time. Of course, if you don’t, it’s still pretty decent just admiring what the artist here did with what he had.
You can also check out some other awesome Daft Punk equipment, like this Daft Punk Helmet, and these Daft Punk Bearbricks.
