I love Skyrim. It’s a game I’ve spent many hours in, most of the time just wandering around and looking at things. It was the first game I really lost myself in and it holds a special place in my heart. Usually I play a sneaky magic user; if I can’t snipe enemies with a bow, I’ll light them on fire! There are many beautiful costumes and weapons in the game and I’d love to build all of them. Sadly, “all of the things” isn’t a good starting point, so I chose to focus my attention first towards Novice Mage Robes and a Staff of Fireballs.
When I started looking into this project I wasn’t sure I could pull it off, so most of the decisions I made were tiny steps that I thought would make the project as easy as possible. This wasn’t always the best way to go about it, but in the end I think this prop worked out great! I started with lots of research, which really boiled down to googling and then playing Skyrim and getting completely distracted. In the end the only online resource I really used was the picture of the staff in the link above. Plus I lent heavily on the awesome lessons I learnt from Lumin’s Workshop when I attended their cosplay classes.
My first step was to print off a picture of the staff’s dragon head from the internet over a few pieces of paper. Then I stuck it to a sheet of insulation foam with little globs of blu-tac so I could cut around it using a box cutter. When I had the rough shape down I was able to add extra details and swirly bits by scribbling what I wanted then cutting them out with the knife.
Then because at the start of this project my confidence in if it would turn out at all was incredibly low, I stuck the carved dragon head into the end of a piece of PVC plumbing pipe to see if that would work. It did! I spent more time than I probably should have waving it around and making sound effects while pointing it at the back fence or my poor long-suffering husband. But I had a heap of fun whilst doing it, and that’s really the main point of this project!
During this period of play, I noticed that there was a gap between the edge of the foam and the lip of the pipe that would need to be taken care of. The dragon head needed more bulk to fit correctly and to create a smooth curve to the staff shape, so I cannibalised a previous failed sword project for extra side bulk. The staff from the game has a bulbous section under the neck ridges so this design addition made it a little more accurate to the game. When I first cut out and stuck these pieces of foam to the staff they were very blocky, but I was able to carve them down to be smoother and rounder and fit in with the overall line of the staff.
Once I was reasonably happy with the basic shape of the staff it was time to add in lights. Realistically I should have skipped over the lights and just made a staff that looked like an inert block of wood, but I wanted something that showed the fireball capabilities of the staff. Besides, what’s the point of having a magic staff if it doesn’t do something a little magical?
The first step in this process was to make space for the wires to go in the foam parts of the staff. I wanted the eyes and mouth to light up with fire lights to simulate the fire abilities of the staff, so I put a hole in the eye area and dug out a channel for the LED strip in the mouth then a hole through the top of the nose for the LED strip wires to exit from, and then a channel down the back of the dragon’s head. My plan was to place the battery pack and controls at the base of the staff and this ended up working well.
I did end up needing to make the wire channels in the foam much deeper as there were more wires than I expected needing to be hidden in this area, but I was pleased that the concept worked.
Before doing any wiring, I planned the circuit using a bread board an a lot of help from my awesome engineer brother. It turned out to be a lot more complex than I intended as my understanding of electrical circuits is very basic. I wanted the light to be orange and to flicker if possible, so that upped the difficulty in wiring and added in programming which I wouldn’t have needed if I just went for flat orange or red. But I did want the staff to look like it could actually cast fireballs instead of just being pretty, so I think it was worth it. I included an Arduino Nano so that I could control the colour of the lights and also make them flicker between colours like a fire. The breadboard allowed me to do some testing before everything was wired into place and it worked well!
Then it was time to prepare the LEDs and place them in the staff. I used a RGB strip of LEDs for the mouth and two bulb LEDs for the eyes. But to start with, I just needed to ensure all the correct pegs had wires placed in them and that the wires were placed in the staff in a way that they would be hidden. I chose to use coloured wires to make them easier to tell apart at the other end of the staff when they needed to be plugged into the Arduino. And of course I used so much heat shrink because safety is important.
Each eye bulb needed four wires; one for the ground, then one each for the red, green, and blue lights. I joined each colour together in the neck of the dragon and staggered them to save space. This meant that the lights will always match with the lights they are showing, but this is what I intended from the start, so it took out unneeded complexity from the design. The strip of LEDs for the mouth had metallic pads I could solder the four wires to after I stripped back the plastic. Before soldering them in place I threaded the wires through the hole in the nose so that the LED strip could be slotted into place with aid of the sticker on it’s back side.
Once the initial wiring had been done I realised the holes I had made for the wires down the back of the dragon head were far too small and needed to be widened. This involved digging deeper holes in my beautiful carving which was very nerve-wracking! Once the wires were all in place and threaded through the PVC pipe I made sure they weren’t going anywhere with a few sticks of hot glue.
Then came the most difficult par of all; the wiring and final programming. Most of the work had already been done with the breadboard, but pulling this apart and making sure the solders were sound created a massive mess of wires. I ended up having to cut and extend a bunch of wires to make sure the setup fit in the staff and wasn’t going to leave any of the wires too tight or too twisted. This was the first time I’ve ever wired something this complex and I am proud of how I was able to make it work, even though it isn’t pretty or efficient wiring.
Once it was all done I covered it in hot-glue to further strengthen the solders, hot glued the whole mess to a thin piece of dowel, and placed it into the PVC pipe to hide it away, but still get access to the battery clip, and the Arduino. I got a bit more help from my engineer brother to make sure everything was working well before I got back to the physical crafting, which is a much more comfortable area for me. Thankyou Brother!
Of course, with functioning lights secured in the staff that was shaped to the point where it looked close to finished (it wasn’t) I needed to test it again. Similarly to the first round of testing that included a whole lot of pretending the staff could actually throw fireballs. I did basically the same thing. It was a lot of fun! The lighting made for some rather dramatic, if blurry photos.
Then it was time to fix up my raggedy carving job. I used a plaster putty it fill in the holes I’d made for the wires, attach the foam carving to the PVC pipe more solidly, and smoothed out the seem lines between the separate pieces of foam. I also got out some sandpaper to smooth off some of the rougher edges, but I didn’t need to be too careful, because the foam won’t be the final layer. I planned to cover everything in thermoplastic for a consistent surface to paint on, and to add some hopefully interesting texture to the surface.
The last thing I needed to do before pulling out the thermoplastic was to diffuse the light from the LED strip in the mouth. I tried out a lot of filters for this, but I found the best one was to use glittery sequined fabric, covered in the packing material my LED strip came in, then a small strip of clear worbla to hold it all together. This wasn’t a perfect solution, but it was the best I came up with. Plus the glittery fabric added an extra little bit to the flickering lights and makes the plain oranges looks a tiny bit more like flames.
Next I covered everything in thermoplastic. My original plan was to just cover the foam part, but then couldn’t get the seam between the thermoplastic and the PVC pipe to look right, so I just extended the thermoplastic down over the pipe as well. This started off as a lazy way to avoid doing a whole bunch of sanding, but ended up solving a problem I didn’t even realise I had. That problem was the cap holding the electronics in the end of the staff which has a massive lip in it. So I built the thermoplastic up a little bit to meet the lip and the join became less visible.
Once everything was covered up I squished down the edges and smoothed them into shape so it looked like the thermoplastic was always that shape. Then I used carving tools to better define the swirls I’d cut into the foam and the back of the big knife to better define the dragon’s neck ridges. Overall I just neatened up the thermoplastic to make it as smooth as possible, whilst trying to make the corners and details as clear as possible.
Then just to make things trickier for myself, and because I never seem to know when to stop it with the swirly details, I used the carving tools and my heat gun to cut a few more loops and curls into the staff. Initially I planned to leave this plain, but having no details at all on the staff and such nice swirly detail on the dragon head didn’t work for me. The extra swirls seemed to tie the staff together as a single object a little better, instead of two separate pieces stuck together.
Then to create a wood grain, I took at the staff with a rasp. This was really hard to do and I was so worried I would wreck the entire thing! But the rough surface did look a lot more like wood grain and gave a great base for painting over.
Painting started with priming. I chose to prime in black so that the black would sit low in all the little swirls and cuts and create a nice depth of shadow. It also meant that if I missed any bits with painting it wouldn’t look too bad. I primed with a rattle can, but first covered the LEDs with blu-tac to mask it. This did a reasonable job as I didn’t need a crisp line, and was a lot easier than using masking tape.
Before attempting the colours of wood on the whole staff I painted in the swirls and groves in a sparkly copper, because magic staff needs sparkles! The colour is very strong against the black, and the size of paintbrush I used made it difficult to only work it into the grooves, not all the space around it. But it was dimmed down with the next few layers of paint. I also used the copper to fill in the space the black prime coat hadn’t reached around the eyes and mouth because of the blu-tac. I hoped this would give the lights a little extra shine to glitter off.
Then many layers of dry-brushing, starting with green. Not a very strong green, but one that was close to black and almost a muddy colour. As much as possible I tried to stay away from the copper, but it was encouraging to see the extra copper around the edges of the swirls disappearing under this layer of paint.
Then, a layer of red. The wood tone of the staff is a warm brown and I wanted this to come through the undertones as well as the highlights. I lay down this red coat to try and achieve this. However, at this stage, the copper colour I loved so much started to disappear and I started to have some deep concerns about my choices of paint colours.
The next layer was orange. I was concerned that this layer might have been too close in colour to the red coat. It wasn’t really, but this was the point in the project that it was so close to being done that all of my apprehensions had very little to focus on so they focused here.
After I painted this layer I felt certain that I had completely wrecked the whole project and I would have to work out a way to strip the paint without getting the electronics waterlogged. With only one layer of paint to go, and that layer being a somewhat icky looking yellow colour, I was certain that the whole paint job was a disaster. Thankfully my husband encouraged me to continue with the final coat.
I approached the yellow layer with more than a little scepticism. As with the other layers of paint I started dry-brushing from the cap end at the bottom of the staff. By the time I reached the nose of the dragon I felt much better about how it was looking! I still think this yellow colour is icky on its own, but it did wonders over the paint layers I had already put down. Which was fantastic, because I didn’t have any time to spare to strip the paint away and try again. I cut this prop very close to the deadline of a planned photo shoot. I’m so glad I got it done!
Before this is actually finished I want to pick the copper out a little clearer with a finer brush and seal the paint with a clear sealant. But at this stage I called it finished enough for photos so took it to the shoot. I enjoyed making this prop along with the rest of the costume and the photo shoot was so much fun that it was a fantastic reward for all the hard work I’d put into it.
I managed to take a sneaky selfie in the changing room after the makeup artist had put on this fantastic makeup and made my hair look amazing! In the future, I will do a more detailed post on the novice mage robes themselves, and hopefully by that stage I will have proper photos from the shoot to show off. But for now, I’m proud of my efforts on the Staff of Fireballs prop. I’m already planning the next prop to make and looking forward to it!
