Worbla Pearly Art

Welcome to the family, Worbla’s Pearly Art! In order to make this review as fair as possible we decided to compare this new Worbla material to the older Worbla types. 🙂 So we made the same bracer 3 times out of regular, black and pearly Worbla to compare them, within 1 livestream! And the results are…..

Regular Worbla: The first bracer of the night. Worbla’s finest art stays the best for foundation parts and large surfaces in general. It’s the strongest, but unfortunately also the least smooth. Working with this Worbla gives you sturdy pieces but you’ll spend more time priming the surface for that smooth finish.
Worbla’s Black art: This bracer was made by Liza following the same bracer pattern. During the craftsession we noticed once again that Black Art has a tendency to tear a bit more easily than regular Worbla. This is easily fixed by pushing this tear shut. You won’t see anything of it later. But truth be told, Black Worbla is in its best element when used to sculpt little details. Too bad that photographing these details before you paint them is so difficult. ;___;
Worbla’s Pearly Art: We really love this new Worbla! It’s smooth and elastic, easy to work with and photographs beautifully! And you can draw your patterns on it. ♥ I will definitely be using pearly Worbla more often in the future! 😀 It’s more elastic/stretchy than Black Worbla and therefore doesn’t tear as easily. And it’s even smoother! It also worked perfectly for sculpting the details.

Before we started crafting we also made a little poll on our Instagram: Regular Worbla vs Black Worbla. And we ended with 39% votes Regular vs 61% votes for Black.
So if you like Black Worbla you’ll probably also like Worbla’s Pearly Art. Pearly Art is closest to Black Worbla but even smoother and stronger!

Primer and paint

Now for the next part of our Pearly Worbla review: primer and paint!

For all bracers, we primed the bottom half and left the top half “raw”. This way, you can see the difference between primed & unprimed in both painted and unpainted Worbla! 😀
We used 3-4 thin coats of (diluted) primer from CosplayClues for these.

Regular Worbla: Unprimed, it has a coarse structure and doesn’t really make metallic paint look pretty. With primer it becomes fairly smooth, but wouldn’t look convincing for items that need to look like metal. I’ve seen really pretty armors that used the contrast between primed and unprimed for extra texture though!
Worbla’s Black art: It’s smoother when not primed, and pretty comparable when primed. You don’t need as many coats for black Worbla as regular; 2-3 coats should do the trick. Also, colours weren’t quite as opaque on the unprimed surface. For even colours, definitely use a primer.
Worbla’s Pearly Art: This new Worbla is smooth as a newborn eel. I swear to god. xD This stuff is amazing. It’s definitely the smoothest out of the three, even when unprimed. Without primer the paint sort of behaves like watercolor, which is very pretty, but it’s hard to get an even surface. With primer, the paint is easy to get even and opaque and it has an incredible shine. One coat of primer is plenty – if you’re going for high gloss, you can do two.

So I think you can tell we’ve fallen quite deeply in love with Pearly Worbla ♥ If you’d like to see more of it, we’ll be using it for our Witch Mercy and Dragon Symmetra costumes, so keep an eye out for that progress 😉 😀

We hope this helped! Any questions, feel free to ask!