Introduction Prop-making is an extremely useful skill in Cosplay and there are many tutorials out there that teach you the intricacies of doing one by yourself. Unfortunately, there are a number of tutorials which feature workshop machinery like lathes, bench drills and belt sanders; hardware of which Cosplayers of our country are hard pressed to find and/or afford, much less having a workshop in their own home. This limitation, however, does not mean we cannot make decent looking props with normal tools. This tutorial will concentrate on how you can make Sice’s Scythe (from Final Fantasy Type Zero) with tools you can probably find in your own home, from start to end, while maintaining durability and portability.
Scythe Tutorial: Final Fantasy Type-0’s Sice Tutorial by Jo / Blacklash blacklash90.deviantart.com Photos by William Wong aka Rescend facebook.com/Rescend
1. Blueprinting The most important aspect to every prop is blueprinting. There are many methods of doing so but today we’ll concentrate on a method I use to call Scaling. For the sake of simplicity, I will round down all future figures to the nearest whole number. Most of us know that many characters in both anime and games can carry larger than life weapons and they can be incredibly huge at times. The scythe that Sice carries is no exception. However, we are (most of the time) not as tall or as big as the characters we intend to portray. Therefore, scaling allows me to adjust the measurements to my height and proportions while maintaining that “larger than life” look. 1 What I did was to use my computer screen to measure how tall the character was in the picture on my screen and in this case, it is 110mm. My height is 166cm, and that means that all measurements I make from the screen has to be multiplied by a factor of 15. (1660mm / 110mm = 15). Once you have the factor, you can get the measurements of how the prop should be scaled to your proportion. For example, on-