Coz
Sr Member
Hey peeps!
Recently went to the Leeds Zombie Film Festival, and part of my semi-survivor ('semi' cuz I got bit) costume was a baseball bat, built at speed the day before the show, so please excuse the lack of a real tutorial, as I totally bogarted Dave Lowes' build here, but with a couple of additional steps due to the base bat I used.
His original build is here: DAVE LOWE DESIGN the Blog: Making a Zombie Bashing Baseball Bat Prop Arsenal
Okay, so I started out with 2 foam bats from the 99p Shop, like this:
First order of business was extending the handle as per the Dave Lowe method, though I used a wooden dowel that went from the end cap of the handle to just past the top of the handle section.
The other bat donated about 8" of its handle for this, and for a nice tight fit I wrapped the dowel with duct tape before contact-gluing everything nice & tight.
After letting that dry, I coated the red part of the bat with a couple of coats of PVA glue to seal it for paint.
First couple of coats onto that were mixed in a light yellow-tan acrylic with a bit of PVA added for luck.
I didn't paint the handle as I knew I was just gonna wrap that in tape, tho I did make sure to catch the top of the blue part just in case.
Bit of a jump now - after a couple more quick coats of gradually more orange-brown paint (just gradually darkened my paint mix), I started on the fun job of bloodying up the bat. Overkill? Nah!
Here you can see I added some cloth tape to the handle before blooding. Blood is more acrylic paint/PVA thinned with a bit of water darkened with a little black and a touch of green to make it almost brown/burgundy - I wanted a nice dried blood effect base.
I then added slightly redder washes and splatters & smears in random layers.
Here is the end of the bat, with two grooves that were bothering me. The blood in them worked well to sell a wooden look.
Top of the handle, where it meets the 'wood' - I ingrained the blood around here for added depth by doing a very thin black/dirty wash over the cloth tape.
The end cap also got the wood effect colour, then bloodied down.
Finally, here's how I dealt with those grooves - rusty barbed wire!
Okay, not real barb wire. Knotted garden twine with a thick soaking of dark grey acrylic paint to stiffen it some. I added 'blood' to the tips after this pic.
And that was me done! It was after midnight, but it was finished!
The paint has survived pretty well, only a couple of scratches & scrapes. I'd been afraid of it sloughing off like snakeskin, but the PVA helps it to stay on the foam.
What do you think, sirs?
Coz.
Recently went to the Leeds Zombie Film Festival, and part of my semi-survivor ('semi' cuz I got bit) costume was a baseball bat, built at speed the day before the show, so please excuse the lack of a real tutorial, as I totally bogarted Dave Lowes' build here, but with a couple of additional steps due to the base bat I used.
His original build is here: DAVE LOWE DESIGN the Blog: Making a Zombie Bashing Baseball Bat Prop Arsenal
Okay, so I started out with 2 foam bats from the 99p Shop, like this:
First order of business was extending the handle as per the Dave Lowe method, though I used a wooden dowel that went from the end cap of the handle to just past the top of the handle section.
The other bat donated about 8" of its handle for this, and for a nice tight fit I wrapped the dowel with duct tape before contact-gluing everything nice & tight.
After letting that dry, I coated the red part of the bat with a couple of coats of PVA glue to seal it for paint.
First couple of coats onto that were mixed in a light yellow-tan acrylic with a bit of PVA added for luck.
I didn't paint the handle as I knew I was just gonna wrap that in tape, tho I did make sure to catch the top of the blue part just in case.
Bit of a jump now - after a couple more quick coats of gradually more orange-brown paint (just gradually darkened my paint mix), I started on the fun job of bloodying up the bat. Overkill? Nah!
Here you can see I added some cloth tape to the handle before blooding. Blood is more acrylic paint/PVA thinned with a bit of water darkened with a little black and a touch of green to make it almost brown/burgundy - I wanted a nice dried blood effect base.
I then added slightly redder washes and splatters & smears in random layers.
Here is the end of the bat, with two grooves that were bothering me. The blood in them worked well to sell a wooden look.
Top of the handle, where it meets the 'wood' - I ingrained the blood around here for added depth by doing a very thin black/dirty wash over the cloth tape.
The end cap also got the wood effect colour, then bloodied down.
Finally, here's how I dealt with those grooves - rusty barbed wire!
Okay, not real barb wire. Knotted garden twine with a thick soaking of dark grey acrylic paint to stiffen it some. I added 'blood' to the tips after this pic.
And that was me done! It was after midnight, but it was finished!
The paint has survived pretty well, only a couple of scratches & scrapes. I'd been afraid of it sloughing off like snakeskin, but the PVA helps it to stay on the foam.
What do you think, sirs?
Coz.
