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Description
you can find the full walkthrough tutorial and WIP pictures here kazplay.com/varaformheadbuild/

Here are my thoughts about this material:

Kazplay

Varaform Head - Lessons learned

Now that the Female Worgen Death Knight head is complete and I’ve had a chance to wear her around, I want to take a moment to compile my thoughts and give my overall opinion of Varaform.

First off I want to again thank CosplaySupplies for approaching me with this project and for providing me with the Varaform to build it with! It’s been a great experience working with them to make my tutorial.

Now let me talk about wearing the finished head. The final weight of the head is 1 lb 12 oz. It’s very lightweight and comfortable. There is a *ton* of airflow through this mask, a large part of that is because of the big open snarly mask, but there is a remarkable amount of airflow through the Varaform. My husband and I did tests, were we covered the open areas of the mask as well as held up a personal neck fan to the face. Anyone who has worn a fursuit will tell you that fans are a Godsent, airflow right through fur and will cool you off very quickly. I could feel the air flowing through the fur and the varaform parts of the face, even when the personal neck fan was held a foot away from the head. That right there is what I feel is the number one advantage of this material. It was the first thing that popped in my head when I first heard of the material, and I couldn’t be happier that it works so well for that.

Next I need to acknowledge that this what my very first time working with this material. While I did my best learning how to work with it, I know there is still plenty to figure out about this material. I don’t have all the answers, I’m positive there are better techniques that can be used to work with Varaform that I haven’t figured out yet. The head has some flaws as a result, there’s some crookedness, and asymmetry, but instead of becoming frustrated and giving up, I decided to embrace those flaws as a feature and make her a Death Knight. A battle hardened warrior raised from the dead would not have a perfect face. In fact I may just go back and add some facial scarring or add some damage to her ear to further that idea. The lesson that I want to pass on from that is to never underestimate the value of finishing a project. There are critical lessons to be learned in those final steps of actually finishing a piece that you don’t learn anytime else. It’ll always come out better than you think it will.

So I talked about the advantages, that being the weight and the airflow, those are two big ones as comfort while wearing a cosplay greatly enhances the experience for everyone involved. Now let's talk about the material’s shortcomings. Personally I found Varaform to be very tricky to work with, my learning curve with it was difficult to overcome. I actually built two headforms out of varaform, I decided the first one I built wasn’t good enough to use. There are times when it is better to start over than finish, I decided I wasn’t far enough in and that finishing my first failed headbase would be more headache than to take the lessons learned and forming a new base. I’m glad that I was more or less obligated to make it work, else I probably would have given up. I’m glad because I am happy with the results I got, and I see a ton of potential in the material, it just took a long while to ‘click’ with me. I still feel that I can find a better way to form it, so if you decide to give this material a try, don’t get frustrated, work through your personal learning curve and I think this will be a rewarding material for you

One big mistake I made on this build was the lips. One feature about varaform is that it is slightly flexible, it has a springy quality to it. I can squeeze and compress the head slightly and it will pop right back. In my opinion, this is a pro to the material because it’ll absorb the shock if dropped instead of cracking or breaking. But you can see how it would be a problem to sculpt with apoxie sculpt- which sets completely rigid. I already have a crack in the back part of the lip because the understructure flexed and the thin part of the lip had too much stress on it. I didn’t even think about that until after the lips had cured. It was an ‘oh crap’ moment for sure. The Apoxie sculpt technique is a good technique to use with a resin base head where the understructure is solid, but it’s a bad idea for any slightly flexible base, like a Varaform one. Learn from my mistake! It would have been far better to make lips similar to how I did the gums (and exactly how I did on Hogger) with the cotton ball and neoprene. Additionally, the Apoxie sculpt was one of the heaviest parts of this build, so I imagine the head would be around 1 lbs if I had chosen neoprene instead.

So I really hope that you all enjoyed watching this build! And I hope you were able to learn something from it as well. If you do decide to give Varaform a try, please let Cosplay Supplies know that you heard about it from me, it will help more opportunities like this come up in the future!

I am entertaining offers if you’d like to buy this head from me, and I would be willing to build some hands to go along with it, and/or add that facial scarring for an extra fee if you’re interested. Shoot me a DM!

Description
you can find the full walkthrough tutorial and WIP pictures here kazplay.com/varaformheadbuild/

Here are my thoughts about this material:

Kazplay

Varaform Head - Lessons learned

Now that the Female Worgen Death Knight head is complete and I’ve had a chance to wear her around, I want to take a moment to compile my thoughts and give my overall opinion of Varaform.

First off I want to again thank CosplaySupplies for approaching me with this project and for providing me with the Varaform to build it with! It’s been a great experience working with them to make my tutorial.

Now let me talk about wearing the finished head. The final weight of the head is 1 lb 12 oz. It’s very lightweight and comfortable. There is a *ton* of airflow through this mask, a large part of that is because of the big open snarly mask, but there is a remarkable amount of airflow through the Varaform. My husband and I did tests, were we covered the open areas of the mask as well as held up a personal neck fan to the face. Anyone who has worn a fursuit will tell you that fans are a Godsent, airflow right through fur and will cool you off very quickly. I could feel the air flowing through the fur and the varaform parts of the face, even when the personal neck fan was held a foot away from the head. That right there is what I feel is the number one advantage of this material. It was the first thing that popped in my head when I first heard of the material, and I couldn’t be happier that it works so well for that.

Next I need to acknowledge that this what my very first time working with this material. While I did my best learning how to work with it, I know there is still plenty to figure out about this material. I don’t have all the answers, I’m positive there are better techniques that can be used to work with Varaform that I haven’t figured out yet. The head has some flaws as a result, there’s some crookedness, and asymmetry, but instead of becoming frustrated and giving up, I decided to embrace those flaws as a feature and make her a Death Knight. A battle hardened warrior raised from the dead would not have a perfect face. In fact I may just go back and add some facial scarring or add some damage to her ear to further that idea. The lesson that I want to pass on from that is to never underestimate the value of finishing a project. There are critical lessons to be learned in those final steps of actually finishing a piece that you don’t learn anytime else. It’ll always come out better than you think it will.

So I talked about the advantages, that being the weight and the airflow, those are two big ones as comfort while wearing a cosplay greatly enhances the experience for everyone involved. Now let's talk about the material’s shortcomings. Personally I found Varaform to be very tricky to work with, my learning curve with it was difficult to overcome. I actually built two headforms out of varaform, I decided the first one I built wasn’t good enough to use. There are times when it is better to start over than finish, I decided I wasn’t far enough in and that finishing my first failed headbase would be more headache than to take the lessons learned and forming a new base. I’m glad that I was more or less obligated to make it work, else I probably would have given up. I’m glad because I am happy with the results I got, and I see a ton of potential in the material, it just took a long while to ‘click’ with me. I still feel that I can find a better way to form it, so if you decide to give this material a try, don’t get frustrated, work through your personal learning curve and I think this will be a rewarding material for you

One big mistake I made on this build was the lips. One feature about varaform is that it is slightly flexible, it has a springy quality to it. I can squeeze and compress the head slightly and it will pop right back. In my opinion, this is a pro to the material because it’ll absorb the shock if dropped instead of cracking or breaking. But you can see how it would be a problem to sculpt with apoxie sculpt- which sets completely rigid. I already have a crack in the back part of the lip because the understructure flexed and the thin part of the lip had too much stress on it. I didn’t even think about that until after the lips had cured. It was an ‘oh crap’ moment for sure. The Apoxie sculpt technique is a good technique to use with a resin base head where the understructure is solid, but it’s a bad idea for any slightly flexible base, like a Varaform one. Learn from my mistake! It would have been far better to make lips similar to how I did the gums (and exactly how I did on Hogger) with the cotton ball and neoprene. Additionally, the Apoxie sculpt was one of the heaviest parts of this build, so I imagine the head would be around 1 lbs if I had chosen neoprene instead.

So I really hope that you all enjoyed watching this build! And I hope you were able to learn something from it as well. If you do decide to give Varaform a try, please let Cosplay Supplies know that you heard about it from me, it will help more opportunities like this come up in the future!

I am entertaining offers if you’d like to buy this head from me, and I would be willing to build some hands to go along with it, and/or add that facial scarring for an extra fee if you’re interested. Shoot me a DM!