Thigh Plates

The thigh plates are basically huge maple leaf looking armor that protect the hip and thigh area of the wearer. You'll just need to cut out a pattern from a sheet of plastic and heat up small areas of the plastic to give it accents and detail.
template

Here is a printable template for you to construct your own thigh armor from.
The leafs need to be detailed a little bit to get the flat look of the sheet plastic out of it. We need to heat up small sections of the plastic and press those in to make valleys in the surface, this will give an added dimension of look to the armor.
image needed For detailed thermaforming like this I like to use a hand held heatgun. These range in price from $20.00 to $100.00 (USA currency). The most common place to find these are in the paint stripping areas of hardware stores. Heat guns are used to strip paint from walls and buildings. Make sure the heatgun reaches temperatures of at least 350° fahrenheit (177° celsius). This is the minimum temperature needed to melt plastic.
I will heat up a section of plastic about 3 inches long and depress that with my finger. You do not want the plastic to get too hot, but just hot enough to depress under your finger.
I only press the plastic in .5 or .75 inches deep. I hold my finger in place till the plastic cools enough to hold the shape itself.
Here's the final piece with all the depressions in the plastic. The whole process of cutting, heating and cooling the plastic takes about 45 minutes per leaf. The more leafs you do the fast it will be. For one Evil Ash costume you only need 2 leafs.
Now we need to bend the leaf along it's vertical axis so that the leaf will rest against the natural curve of your body. Just heat up the plastic along the center of the leaf in a straight line.
Once the plastic is hot enough to bend with your hands, just grab the leaf firmly and bend along the axis.
Notice the angle of bend that we put into the plastic.
You can now cut out the irregular holes that are needed in the armor. We did the holes last because if they were cut out before now it would have made thermaforming the plastic into a uniform shape that much harder.

Once the holes are cut out you are ready to paint and attach the armor to the rest of the costume.
In the Movie used armor, the thighs are connected to the abdomen armor. We had to cut a few corners in our costume and decided to not make the abdomen armor out of a rigid material but a flexible leather. We decided to attach the thigh plates to the chest armor due to the fact that the leather would not hold the weight of the thigh plates.

-end thigh armor-