Since last entry, I’ve finished the sheathe! My previous entry already covered the sword wrap part of the sheathe. Now I’ll show what I did for the rest of it.
I moved onto the butt of the sheathe, and the references for the design on it were kind of inconsistent. It didn’t even seem consistent between pre-timeskip and post-timeskip, even though it’s the same sword. This is what I ended up with as a base:
The lines are done with craft foam, and the circles are balls of hot glue. After putting the base down, I covered it with Worbla. It’s actually 3 pieces of Worbla stuck together – one to cover the bottom of the sheathe and then one on each side.
I’m going to sound like a broken record in this entry because almost everything I’ve done with the sword follows the same ending process. I covered the Worbla with layers of Gesso and then sanded it when it dried.
The last part is painting, which I used a bronze base coat and then layered with gold paint.
During the whole time I was working on the sword, I was also working on the rings for the sheathe. These were so annoying because I needed so many! Shigure’s sheathe has 26 of them, and I also made 6 extra as spares.
I started by making a template in Photoshop and printing it out. I traced and cut these out of craft foam. (I had the wrong number before, so this photo is before I made a few more rings.)
Like before, these pieces were covered in Gesso and then painted with the gold paint. I painted some gold paint on poster paper and cut circles out of those too. They were then glued to the back of the rings to form a bottom.
The last step was getting everything together. The middle lines are also done with craft foam, covered with Gesso, and painted. I marked the spacing between the rings with pencil, and then everything is just hot glued onto the sheathe.
The whole thing took me a while to do because there is so much waiting when it comes to Gesso and painting! Now I’m working on the sword and will have another entry on that soon.