Alessandra’s Shield

shield3I took my long-time student Alessandra as a proper apprentice recently, and I decided to give her this shield (which I had already started building for her before we started discussing her taking a belt from me) as an apprenticing gift to support her interest in armored combat.

The basic construction of the shield was identical to the last one I made for myself, except that I edged it with a rawhide strip purchased from Viking Leathercrafts instead of a dog chew (never again!). The edging went on beautifully and easily, and was not terribly expensive (though I did buy two to save on shipping).

I did not relish the idea of painting her device on the shield freehand, so I decided to make use of modern technology to cheat. I had already laid out her device in Illustrator, so I sized it up to the correct dimensions and printed it out, tiled onto four sheets of paper that I taped together. The paper template was affixed to a sheet of contact paper with spray adhesive, and then the contact paper applied to the shield (already painted with white spray paint and blue house paint). I then cut out the image with an x-acto knife, which was tedious but far less so than trying to paint inside the lines by hand would have been. I masked off the rest of the shield with newspaper and tape, then hit it with a generous coat of gold spray paint. There was the tiniest bit of underspray at a couple of points, but it’s only noticeable on very close inspection. The same technique was used for the red part of the roses, which were finished with hand painted leaves and centers and an outline of brown Sharpie for a little extra definition.