WWWIP 2019 Week 8: Kyle
Hello everyone! This past week I continued to sew together the outfits. I would like to show you a quick and easy way to make EVA foam pauldrons from start to finish. This method will utilize heat forming to squish the edges of the foam in order to create a dome shape.
Pauldron Materials you will need:
- A well-ventilated room
- Pencil and eraser
- Permanent marker
- Rulers
- Painters tape
- Glad Press'n Seal or Plastic Wrap
- Drafting paper for patterns
- A bowl roughly the size that you want your pauldron to be
- EVA foam
- Scissors to cut your foam and paper
- Heat gun
- Super glue (optional for details and as a backup resource)
- Canned air (optional)
Patterning:
Grab your bowl and cover the inside with either Glad Press'n Seal or a plastic wrap reinforced with tape. 
Take your shape out and place it on your shoulder to make sure it will fit properly, and draw a loose outline of your pauldron with a permanent marker. Cut away the excess.
Snip even darts around your shape cover so that it can lay flat. Trace your shape onto paper, filling in sections where the darts don't cover, and leaving dotted lines inside for reference as a back-up plan. These darts can still be cut out if your foam doesn't want to create the right dome shape from the heating process. 
Clean up your drawing by dividing it into quarters. Clean up either one-half or one-fourth of your pattern based on the symmetry of your pauldron. 
Cut out the part that you have cleaned up, and then fold the pattern on the dividing lines. Trace your cut-out part onto the other side and then cut it out.
Forming:
Trace your pattern onto your EVA foam and cut out the shape. 
While in a well-ventilated room, carefully heat up the foam on both sides with a heat gun until the surface smooths out and slightly changes shade or glistens. Too much heat can start to burn the surface of the foam, so you may want to practice heating scraps to find the right amount of heat for your foam. 
Once your foam is heated up on both sides, press your pauldron into the bowl, and pinch the edges until they contract enough to form to the shape of the bowl. 
You can optionally take a can of condensed air, invert it, and use the cold blast from it to quick-cool parts of your foam as you go so that you don't have to worry about shaping the whole thing at once.
If your foam is being stubborn and won't hold the shape you need, don't lose hope. You can still cut out the darts from your initial pattern and glue them together to help create your dome shape.
Congratulations! You should now have a finished pauldron shape that you can add details to or seal and paint. You can check out my post from the previous week for a quick guide on stretching fabric over your shape as an alternative finish to paint.
Thank you all for reading; I hope it will aid you in all of your shoulder armor endeavors!