Mass Effect 3 – Garrus Vakarian: Visor and mask

I’m lately on fire with the tutorials! Today I’m going to show you how I made the visor and how we painted Garrus’s mask.

Photo: Jesús Clares .

The visor is a very simple piece, but essential for this character, who does not take it off even to f****. I think it is one of the most characteristic elements of Garrus.

I made it using an elongated piece of Forex (PVC foam) with a couple of EVA rubber plates of different textures glued with my dear super glue.

I painted it with a metallic effect and added a piece of methacrylate to which we had previously made the relief designs that it has with the dremel (the HUD for watching porn that Garrus has integrated). I curved both the methacrylate and the PVC by heating them a little bit.

We gave it the final touch by adding a blue LED. All the grooves and edges of the methacrylate reflect the light, giving the piece a really cool effect.

We screw it to the mask once we finished the whole process.

We didn’t make the mask. Winters bought it from My Wicked Armor (check them out because they do some amazing work). As it happens, this mask is by far my favorite of all the Garrus ones I’ve seen in the world, so it fills me with pride and satisfaction to have included this work of art in our cosplay.

Since it’s not made by us, I’ll just talk about how I painted it.

I started by giving it a layer of black spray primer.

The rest is painted with acrylics and a brush. First I applied a layer of a medium gray tone on the entire mask and then I added lights, shadows and details.

With a brush very lightly loaded with paint, I dabbed darker tones into the cracks, the joints of the reliefs and the edges. Then I blended in lighter tones inwards, towards the smoother parts, and highlighted with a light gray tone.

This is very important (and is also a makeup technique): faces are not simply flat, they have various tones. As much as, at first, we see Garrus’s face and it seems gray to us, it has different shades and by painting it this way we give it a sense of organic and realistic relief.

My advice is that you never expect that a piece like this, even a gun, a piece of armor or any type of replica, will look good by painting it a flat color or that then, when carrying it, the shadows will be visible simply because how the ambient light affects them. You have to paint it in order to enhance the volumes. It is something that I learned late (and if you see my first armor you can see it) and now it is one of the things that I find most interesting to do. I highly recommend that you see, for example, tutorials for painting Warhammer figures because the effect achieved is practically the same.

To finish, I painted the blue tattoos and scars with different shades of brown/beige.

Since Garrus’s head is very large and there was a lot of space in the back, I made a flesh-colored lycra balaclava with foam padding on the back to achieve the desired shape. It seems to be a very comfortable thing.