Tutorial - Making a leather loincloth

Posted by Raffaele "Picster" Picca

Hey everyone,

today I will show a simple way of creating a leather loincloth for your figure conversions or sculpting.

What it will look like:

What you will need:
- Milliput (other sculpting mediums will work, but for this technique Milliput has some advantages)
- Baking paper
- Sculpting tools

Let's start!

Roll a ball of Milliput and leave it to cure for around 30 minutes. It should be harder than in the beginning but still sculptable.

Place your Milliput ball on a piece of baking paper, cover it with another piece of baking paper and flatten it with some round, cylindrical tool until it has the desired thickness. Less than a millimeter is desireable!

Remove the baking paper on top, it should be easy to remove and should not stick to the Milliput. If it still sticks to the backing paper very much, just wait 10 minutes until it cures a little more.

Now use some sculpting tool or a hobby knife to shape the thin piece of Milliput to the desired shape. Just rip of the sides to get a shredded and used look on the edge of the piece.
If you like to you can dab the piece with a rough brush or a rough sponge to get some leather texture.

Use a fitting sculpting tool like the "Zahle A" to mark the lines where the leather patches will be stitched together. On the edges of the piece you can bend the small corners inside.

Now use a tool like this to mark the holes for the leather band that will be added in the next step.

Roll a small piece of the left over Milliput to a very thin sausage, it should be as even as possible.

Now cut small pieces of this roll and put them on holes like shown on the next photo.

The next step is to use a tool with a small, flat head to pinch the sausages into the pre-made holes.

Almost done! Now just redefine the holes like shown on the next photo. Imagine how the leather is hold together by the leather band.

The last step is to apply this finished piece onto your miniature. As the Milliput is pretty hard at this point you can easily touch it without the risk of leaving fingerprints on the surface.
Just bend some folds into the piece and place it where you like to have it on your miniature.

You can also tear some holes into the leather like on the leather piece next to the demonstration piece.
The size of the leather band can have a huge impact on the overall look and the scale of your piece.

The big disadvantage of this technique is that your piece has no backside. This can easily be fixed by adding some fur to the backside. It even adds some more believability as it looks like some stitched together animal pelts.

I hope you like this tutorial and give it a try!

Best wishes,
Raffa