Beneath the fading town of Dirtmouth sleeps a vast, ancient kingdom. Many are drawn beneath the surface, searching for riches, or glory, or answers to old secrets.” Hollow Knight is an indie 2D side-scrolling game that was released in 2017 by Team Cherry.

This armor piece gets it's own step because it one of the last pieces I made so it has some variation in methods as I wanted to test something new. Probably one of the more tedious parts (Just from the sheer number of pieces, it was actually pretty simple to make) have got to be the gauntlets. They look great but are time consuming to make. They will however limit your movement in your hands so if you plan on using them for something like a Halloween party I'll talk about a method to make using your hands a bit more manageable later on. Printing isn't overly difficult once you have the whole digital aspect of the print finished. I had my nail printed into 5 smaller pieces that printed over the course of a week. Just make sure to monitor the prints and keep a steady flow of filament in the printers to make sure you don't need to restart a print. When I printed the nail I used 0% infill which saved on filament costs but caused more print errors so be careful! For the stamp I just went with a basic coat of purple paint and a white drybrush to show off some of the details. A wash is very optional but do it if you want! The next alteration that you can make is gluing some "Web Rope" in strips around the arms where the arm armor goes. This is so you don't have to tie the actual armor onto the costume when putting it on as well as adding more general detail. To attach the "Web Rope" I used hot glue on one end and wrapped it around loose enough so that my arm could still slip out. And then used hot glue to secure the other end. Make sure to protect your arm under the morph suit when doing this. You can put a sheet of baking paper under the morph suit to prevent glue burns when attaching the "Web Rope".No cost too great. No mind to think. No will to break. No voice to cry suffering. Born of God and Void. You shall seal the blinding light that plagues their dreams. You are the Vessel. You are the Hollow Knight." For the horns they are a little thin and are one of the areas people like to grab the most. So to ensure they don't snap off when you walk into a door frame because you forget you are wearing them (*Cough* *Cough*) you can fill them with expanding foam. Once the expanding foam fully expands you can duct tape the holes shut and move onto the next step. The whole process of painting massive props like this is much easier than people think. The whole process can be put into three general steps. Which is good people because it makes it easier for me to summarise ;) Finally we begin the actual prop making of the project! The Nail is the first part of the project I built and is the origin of my spiral into madness. It is the sword that the Hollow Knight uses thought the game and it progressively gets upgraded throughout. I thought this model would look really good and the realistic damage that the model has really helped the vibe of the overall costume that I had no idea I was about to make Grey Non See-Though Fabric (This is used for the cape so get a 2m piece. I'm 6' 6" and that was enough to reach the floor for me)

The wax seal is a bit deceptive because it's not actually made of wax. I tried making the seal using real wax but every time I'd pull the wax off of the stamp it would crumble, so I found an alternative method. The way we are going to make a durable wax stamp is take a sheet of baking paper (I used a smooth metal surface in the photos it has the same effect just needs a little prying) and put a ton of hot glue onto the sheet. Next stamp the 3D printed stamp into the hot glue, holding it there until it dries. Once dried you can peel the hot glue off of the stamp and you'll be left with a faux wax stamp. Ok so first off most of this project involves 3D Printing, which can take a long time. Especially if you have to make most the models from scratch. However I've saved you the effort and gathered all the models I made/used in the making of this costume. So you will need them all before we start. Printing is a rather simple process just very time consuming. You need (2x) middle parts for each finger (1x) the pinkie and (0x) for the thumb, You need (5x) finger tips one for each finger, you'll also need a main hand part, and a thumb cover part, and then multiply that all by 2 because you'll need a set for each hand. Just use 20% infill and 0.2 layer height. It's not about quality but quantity with each piece. I'd try and fit maybe 5-6 pieces on your build plate per print so it will take multiple prints to fit everything. But once it's all printed you can rip off any supports and move to fitting. For my printing of the parts I used an FDM printer. This should be fairly obvious for people who know already about 3D printers but I feel I should still mention it. Since my printer is an FDM printer I use the slicing program called CURA, in CURA I use the default printer settings for my printer (An Ender 3 Pro) but some print settings I tweaked a bit to save on time/filament during certain parts. Below are the settings and explanations for why they may alternate.I will also mention in this step that you should 3D print out the stamp for the "wax seal" It's a very simple file with no supports and minimal detail needed.

This belt is used to tie together all the oddities and references, and it's rather simple. I used the image of a template I found online as a guide (No there was not a printable version it is literally just the image I worked off of). That would probably be easier to gather than building this thing. The Hollow Knight's helmet is one of the most iconic pieces of the character which is why the most effort has to go into it. So here we go...Glue your diamond-shaped cardboard piece on top, then attach the corresponding foam piece. Remember to have the hole for your dowel rod already cut. Fill in the edges with hot glue and cover edges with duct tape if desired. To make sure the nail doesn't collapse in on itself during proper use, I filled the inside with expanding foam. This kept the inside rigid and helped the gluing process afterwards. Just don't overfill the nail, expanding foam has its name for a reason. It can take over an hour for it to reach its maximum size. When tying up anything I tried to do minimal damage to any of the props as I thought all the props were super cool on their own and if I ever wanted to display them I didn't want them damaged. So here's what I did to tie up all the accessories. So when it came to making this costume I had done multiple iterations of some parts. One of these parts being the Chestplate. I thought both were great each having their pros and cons and I'll go into each below. (When I cover how each was made I'm not going to cover assembly and painting techniques as they follow the same techniques for assembling and painting metal armor as mentioned in previous steps)