The first (and arguably less important) task for the Portal 63 cosplay was obtaining a spear of the right design. I also had the additional requirement, beyond the spear being foam (or similar soft material) that it would have to be collapsible. This was both to make transporting the spear easier, but also because I would be wearing the costume throughout the day, including when attending panels and stage events. Having learned from previous years about being considerate towards those sat behind me, I would need to be able to partially disassemble the spear when sat down.
The best solution by far, given the collapsible requirement and the specific design, was to make the spear myself. This would count as the “new skill” for this costume as I’ve never tried to make a cosplay weapon prop before, let alone one as long as a spear. Fortunately a good friend of mine had some advice, and I have an ample supply of those most useful materials: 3mm foam and hot glue.
For the shaft of the spear I ventured to a (not very) local hardware store to acquire a 2m length of black plastic piping, along with three push-fit connectors and two end caps. I went for the 32mm diameter because I wanted the added thickness to hopefully make the final product more solid. The spear head isn’t a very wide design, so I figured there wouldn’t be too much of a torque on the joints to require more permanent securing methods.
I bought a pipe cutter to cut the pipe in half, and reduce the overall length as necessary. Then I glued the joiner sections with hot glue, one to each end of the lower pipe. The upper joiner would be the base of the spearhead, which I wanted to be detachable for portability reasons. I drew a cardboard template for the spearhead, and used that to cut out sections of 3mm foam to make the head and handle sections. A lot of hot gluing later:
Painting the parts was relatively straightforward, using a base coat of black and top coats of brown/silver acrylic paint.
Now I just had to make the rest of the costume…