Worbla Black Art

Worbla’s Black Art review

Making a breastplate like this one starts for many of us with making the round cups. The method by stretching the Worbla over the right shape (and covering that shape in some way to make sure you can detach the Worbla from it later) is a very common one. But I was interested to see if Worbla’s Black Art would work the same since it’s a little more brittle when heated.
It turned out to be best to heat up 2 pieces of Black Worbla at once and first melt those together and then start shaping them over the ball together. Otherwise one layer of Worbla would have just torn while doing this. (Sophie recommends using this method with regular Worbla as well because tearing such an important part is really not nice! It also keeps it sturdier while traveling with/storing your armor.)

All the details on the breastplate were made separately instead of free-styling them directly onto the piece. Worbla’s Black Art definitely takes detail work a lot better than regular Worbla. At first I didn’t notice the difference that much but when I started folding the little curly parts it was a lot more user-friendly than when I tried the same technique with regular Worbla. When I started attaching the details to the breastplate I had to make sure I thoroughly heated up both the backside of the detail and the location on the breastplate where it was going to be set. I had drawn out all the locations beforehand with a silver pen. Because Black Worbla has a tendency to transmit the heat from the heatgun to a pretty large surface of the piece I made sure to keep the rest of the piece cold by using cold water on the parts I didn’t want to start bending as well.
So the result, thanks to a few tiny adjustments to my methods, was a very sturdy and precise build.

Next was painting!
I already knew that Worbla’s Black Art was a lot smoother than its predecessor. But I was still quite surprised how satisfied I was with the result after only a few layers of wood glue. Painting was ta breeze with adding a base coat, cold shadows and warm highlights.

I hope this write-up will help some of you to get a bit of an idea of what my experiences with Worbla’s Black Art are.

Am I gonna use it again for more projects? I already did! You can see it here in my Daydreamer’s Finery cosplay. ♥

xxx Liza