Star Trek Borg Costume

“Resistance is futile!”. Have you ever had the desire to become one of the greatest Star Trek villains of all time? I have always loved the Borg and decided to build myself a full body Borg suit.

Supplies used to create this build:
EVA foam, automotive wire covers, LED lights, black, silver, metallic purple, and spun gold acrylic paint, black stretch tights and a long sleeve stretch black shirt, lots of steam punk style gears, various types of mechanical looking pieces, various computer circuit boards, a kids robot pick up toy, lots of batteries and lots of hot glue and contact cement, an old small flashlight and some led flashing buttons and a section of a fishing rod case.
White face makeup, setting powder and coloured contact lenses.
Black tights and a long sleeve black shirt. Cling wrap and duct tape for making the patterns.

Here you will wrap your body parts snugly in cling wrap and then duct tape so your patterns can be drawn. Take a black sharpie and draw out your pattern on the duct tape.
Cut out the cling wrap/duct tape pattern and trace it out onto the Eva foam. Cut the foam with a sharp exacto blade. Repeat this for your forearms, upper arms, thighs, lower legs, lower torso and upper torso.

Once you have your patterns heat the foam with a heat gun to seal the Eva foam and to warm it up so it can be shaped to the form you desire.
Use contact cement on the seams of your foam to glue them together.
You can begin to glue on any parts that will be painted black at this point with gorilla glue or hot glue.

At this stage you want to seal your eva foam with plasti dip and then paint it with flat black spray paint. Do this for all eva foam pieces.

At this stage do you want to glue on all of your automotive wire covers in any appropriate layout on the EVA foam pieces that will suit your design. It is helpful to attach each automotive wire covering to some piece of mechanical device that can be glued onto or into the surface of the EVA foam. It makes the wiring look more appropriate then if it were just glued onto the EVA foam.

For this portion I used a variety of lighting techniques. I combined watch style batteries with some wiring and small switches that were attached to various LED lights set inside some of the mechanical devices and things like the small flashlight. I also used many dollar store LED lights such as the types you use on bicycles etc. The dollar store LED lights I dismantled and installed them onto my EVA foam pieces.

At this stage I used an air sprayer and sprayed the metallic purple and spun gold acrylic paint onto the highlighted surfaces of the EVA foam such as the abdominals, fronts of the thighs, biceps and shoulders. This gives some colour dimension to it otherwise flat black paint job creating some additional colour tones and highlights.
I also used silver paint and dry brushed silver on to the automotive wire covers and on any edges of the EVA foam to simulate scratches in the black body armour made out of EVA foam. This creates contrast and gives all of the automotive wire coverings a metallic lock.

Fasteners can be anything such as snaps, glued on elastic bands, Velcro strips or Chicago screws. For this part you just have to use some ingenuity in figuring out how to get the thigh pieces to attach to the torso so they don’t slide down your legs. I used Velcro strips but I would suggest a buckle fastener for superior strength.

The make up portion is rather easy as a lot of this costume is foam armour.
Install your coloured contact lenses prior to putting on makeup.
Start by covering all visible skin above the neckline in a white makeup. Water activated makeup is good. Pax makeup is very good. You mix non tacky pros-aide adhesive with white acrylic paint 50/50.
Blacken around the eye and use a soft grey to hollow out your cheeks.
At this stage you can add some green air brushing to create veining and botching of the skin. The goal is a white deadline appearance.
You could also have an automotive wire glued to you cheek and covered in latex and makeup to appear as though the wire protrudes the skin.

For the arm I used a portion of a fishing rod case and took apart the kids grabber toy and rebuilt it with the handle inside the fishing rod case. I attached various computer circuit boards and mechanical looking devices, led lights and automotive wire covers and a small flashlight with coloured led lights inside and I put a light up fidget spinner on it as well.
The head piece It was made in the same fashion as the body armour with EVA foam a lot of mechanical looking pieces and LED lighting and lots of glue!
Now you have your completed Borg suit, all that remains is to suit up for Halloween, comic cons or just for fun lol!