I wanted to try to make a simple, flat Captain America shield, without all the complication of curvature and painting. It didn’t turn out quite as well as I had hoped for a variety of reasons, but I still like the idea as a much simpler and cheaper alternative to most other shield making options. I found some metallic poster paper in several colors and sizes at the local craft store and picked up some poster board as well for the backer.
I created the template in Gimp and printed it out piece by piece on the many sheets of paper needed to fit the whole 24 inch shape.
I first tried to glue the shapes together stacked on top of each other, but quickly realized glue won’t stick to the shiny side of the paper, so I instead cut each shape out in such a way that it would be in full contact with the poster board. Elmer’s white glue works well for paper to paper gluing, but it can be difficult to glue down such large shapes without wrinkles and bubbles.
Before gluing on the final layer of foam board I used a punch set to punch holes where I would need them for the strap hardware and embedded chicago screws in them. Strapworks.com had some webbing mounts that worked great as strap hardware, and then I fed some polypropylene webbing through them for the straps.
The template is available here.
Another cool simple alternative I came across that does incorporate a curve can be seen here.
