Test Tophat

I followed one of the tutorial videos that 'Lost Wax' has on his page, to make a steampunk top hat, I made it to see how easy and time consuming it is incase I wanted to use this knowledge towards my final piece.

I started by making the main body of the hat out of yoga matt foam and then covering it with smaller squares of foam to make it look like plates going around the top hat.

I then hole punched the thinner sheets of foam to make the rivets that will go around each plate.

Painting it in 3 layers of black paint for the undercoat colour.

And then finally using bronze metallic paint, I used my finger to smudge the paint around each rivet and plate to give the rust metal effect.

In conclusion, even though the hat alone took more than a day to make, I still love the outcome of it and will be using this as a part of my final piece.