Are you a cosplay fan? Or you just need a costume for a carnival? Professional masks worth hundreds of dollars. However you can print one with your 3D printer. Additionally, you can customize its size to fit your proportions. Thanks to the post-production the printed mask can looked even better than the bought one. In this article we will focus on finishing of 3D printed masks.

Web databases provide you with uncountable number of  files for 3D printing uploaded by fans. We have chosen mask of Death Gun downloaded for free from thingiverse. The mask is prepared into several STL files. So you don’t need to slice the model. You can print immediately.  We recomend to print it from white material. Bright base is easier to be painted over.

The parts were glued together with superglue. Two-component adhesive glue is also suitable. When printing from ABS, it is possible to use acetone. The main parts of the
mask were printed vertically. To avoid unsticking from the pad pads, we used the brim function in Slic3r. Following brim removal caused bad fitting of the two halves. The resulting gaps were filled with a 3D pen. This allowed us to close the gap with the same material from which the mask had been printed. Overlapping mass was smoothed with 3D pen handle. If you do not have a 3D pen you can fill the holes with common putty.

Before painting, it is appropriate to smooth the mask with a sandpaper. We used a water-soluble white Bakrylex \s a base color. The color was not diluted. Dense color better covers notches of individual layers. After hardening we can finally begin to dye. We had a set of modeling colors from Revell.

Think twice previously, what color will have a specific part of the mask. We started with gray color. Areas that will be gold in the final were at this stage omitted.

When the gray color was dry we took a silver cup and marked out only certain places with it. Silver color wasn’t spreaded continuously. Thanks to it the mask obtained a credible time-worn appearance. Then the remaining white places were covered with gold color. Grooves were also gold painted. Unfortunately brush painted over surrounding as well. It was necessary to clean these parts with paper napkin soaked in thinner before the gold paint got dry. The golden color remained only in the grooves.

For the glasses we recycled blue PET bottle. And the last to do was fastening the strap for rubber bands.

We recomend to watch our video from series Tips and Tricks abou printing objects bigger than your printer:

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