Now I had to make sure that this Alien was as scary as possible, which meant making my own patterns. To do this I invented my own technique and shockingly, it actually sort of worked!
The first thing I did was to 3d print a scaled down mannequin figure which was 10 times smaller than me (just made the maths easier, but next time i'd probably make it a bit bigger). On to this, I used Monster Clay to sculpt the basic shape that I wanted the suit to be. I had to take into account that the suit needed to be able to fill with air, and I needed to be able to see somehow. I only sculpted one half of this as I would mirror the patterns when they were printed.
Once I had a clay base, I coated it with a layer of liquid latex and strips of toilet paper, the paper added a bit of strength and prevented the latex stretching. Once this was dry, I drew on where I wanted my pattern pieces to be, I tried to keep big, flat shapes where possible, although I knew that the air pressure would push these into more rounded shapes.
Once I cut these shapes out (used talcum powder to stop them sticking to each other), I stuck them to paper, and scanned them in. I used Inkscape to draw round the edges of the patterns and drew in the alignment marks (although i ended up barely using these). I then printed this out at 10 times the size, resulting in paper patterns.
