Prop - Ditto

I was looking for a smaller project, and also wanted to have a go getting a smooth finish on something. Picked the pokemon Ditto for this, quite a simple shape and is a smooth so seemed like a good fit, and also recently played Pokopia a lot!

Materials used

• EVA foam 10mm for the core
• Contact cement for sticking foam layers together
• Foam Clay for outer layers and main shape
• Primer good base and colour buy mainly sandable primer
• Spray paint main colour
• Gloss spray to seal in everything

Tools used

• Knife for cutting out foam
• Silver sharpy for tracing out template
• Heat gun for sealing the foam
• Respirator when working with contact cement or heat-sealing the foam, very important!
• Safety glasses when working with contact cement, you don’t want that stuff in your eyes
• Ruler for general measuring
• Craft knife helpful for cutting paper
• Rotary tool for carving foam

The process

The core pieces together, helps bulk out most of the prop before adding on the foam clay.

First pass of the foam clay over Ditto, this is done on one side initially. Waited for that to dry before doing the other side.

Ditto after the foam clay has dried after another pass or two of foam clay. A lot of cracks but most of these will be covered.

When using the heat gun to seal the foam in, it produced a lot of bubbles.

Didn’t matter too much but went through and popped most of the obvious bubbles. The craft filler helped fill them in along with the cracks.

After the craft filler, this is the result of the primer filler spray. Still plenty of imperfections but a good first step.

Sanding with 400 grit sandpaper has removed most of the obvious bits.

Another filler primer pass and sand for the final base layer. Not sure how the scratches in the middle got there, but after spraying with the colour and filling in with some paint it’s largely been covered.

After two coats of the colour spray, shiny and smooth to the touch.

In an effort to get the face on somewhat accurately, reused the template with the mouth and eyes cut out and used a marker.

The marker bled through the template a bit so it’s a bit messy.

After using more of the spray paint colour (onto a piece of board), was able to cleanup the messy marker lines.

Finished piece after a few light gloss sprays.

Rear view, can see some gloss spray not fully covering parts on the right.

Another angle with less glossy reflections, can see a bit of the marker that bled through but that’s OK.

Just another shot from the front, much smoother and cleaner on the front than the back.

I’m happy with the final piece, definitely not as smooth as I had initially planned, but balancing that with just wanting to finish it I’m still happy. Potentially could have done more layers of the filler primer, also more work to smooth out earlier in the process with sanding and craft filler in key spots.

A bonus of the colour and gloss sprays is they leave a smooth finish so its quite nice to touch, and provides a good visual for how Ditto should look.

Learnings

• More filling and sanding passes, even consider thin resin layers instead
• Potentially painting on the face so there wasn’t the marker smudges, even a light air spray
• Be more thorough with the gloss spray to make sure it’s all covered