How to pattern digi legs- a mini tutorial (part 1?)

Since I get asked this all the time here is a mini step-by-step on how to pattern the foam for a digitigrade full suit. This is just a mini tutorial to tide you folks over till the next tutorial comes out in August. 

Now while it's pretty easy to see what's going on from these pics I just wanted to dive a little more into an explanation just in case anything wasn't super apparent. 

Step 1: Anytime you need to make a new pattern be it for a digi bodysuit or handpaws it's always a good idea to make a paper mockup so you don't waste time and materials. To start draw some sketches of how you want the digitgrade to look, a good way to do this is to take a picture of your DTD (or yourself if this is a personal suit) and draw over the picture in some kind of drawing program so you can get a feel for how you want the digitgrade to look. Even if you don't intend to make attached feet or are only making a body it's always a good idea to include the feet in your patterning so you can get an idea of how everything will look together. If you don't you might end up having a really awkward transition from leg-toe.  Either way once you are happy with the shape you can start scaling it up, you can do this either with math or just by eyeballing but either way you'll need to start by tracing the entire leg onto paper.  Once you have that you should draw the desired digitigrade shape overtop of the leg trace. By doing so you'll naturally start to see shapes emerge around the buttocks, knee, calves, shin, and of course feet. Label each of these shapes and cut them out as separate pieces. The remaining large piece can be kept as a tool to realign everything onto your DTD. 

Step 2: With your pattern now made you can transfer them to foam and begin carving. Whether you want to use a thick 4" block of foam or glue multiple thinner pieces together the choice is yours. For now don't worry about making the pieces look pretty what's important is that you get the initial shapes blocked out. Once you've got them all out you can slap them onto your DTD with a few strips of duct tape or some pins. If you are having trouble figuring out the positioning refer to the original cutout of the leg trace (with all the missing pieces) as a guide. 

Step 3: Once you are happy with the size and positioning of everything you should mark little annotations onto your DTD to help you realign them after. Taking the foam pieces off the DTD you can bulk up the shape a bit more by adding more foam pieces to the sides and rounding them out so they look more natural. Once you are happy with all the shapes you can reattach them to the DTD following the guide you made earlier. A bonus tip is that you can use a piece of 1/2" foam to attach multiple pieces together (like the shin-calf-toes) so you can keep the pieces for future suits and have an easily reusable pattern that simply needs to be scaled up or down to fit the customer.

Step 4: Now that we have everything in place we can plastic-wrap the entire DTD and duct tape. The point of this is to make a copy of the DTD with the modifications of the foam in place.  From there you can just fur the DTD as normal. In the future I may expand on this tutorial by showing you how you can use this same technique to make lining and removable padding but I'll leave that for another day. For now enjoy this mini tutorial!

The second set of images is the exact suit I made using this pattern so you can get an idea of how it all looks together. =)