I'm Not Dead Yet

Welcome back folks! I know you’re all used to my spastic and inconsistent posting at this point so hopefully anyone who wants to see regular stuff from me knows to follow me on Instagram.

So since it’s been two whole months since I posted anything, lets’ dig right into it! First up, I want to share some awesome photos I got of Frog, thanks to my wonderful husband <3

I’m so stoked with how he came out!! I had a lot of fun wearing hi at Tekko and was recognized by quite a few people. I even met a guy who had the whole cast of Chrono Trigger tattooed on his arm!! I have a few friends who cosplay some of the other characters so I’m looking forward to eventually having some friends to wear this with.

Since Tekko, I’ve been working on a few commissions, along with another new cosplay for myself. My first commission is one that I put together pretty quickly for a friend of mine to take to Acen last weekend. While I’ve played Kingdom Hearts 1 & 2, I’m not overly familiar with the series, but I had a lot of fun making Saix’s Claymore.

I made this guy out of layers of foamcore, with a wooden broom handle for the core/handle. Here you can see the central layer and the broom handle, along with the patter I used for it.

Once all the layers were done, I bevelled the whole thing, which took an exceedingly long time, and then coated the exposed foam layers with spackling paste.

Since the bevel spanned multiple layers, I cut them in tiers so that I could sand the foam into an even bevel.

Here’s the spackling paste gooped along the edges of exposed foam.

The rest consisted of a few hours of sandeing, several coats of mod podge, and some paint!

I don’t often have the opportunity to share photos of the full cosplay with my prop commissions, but fortunately for me, I have this wonderful gem from aprinceforflower’s instagram!

Doesn’t Tobi look badass?!!?!

With that done, I took my opportunity to finish up another commission that I started quite a while back. From Baten Kaitos, the obscure but asewome Gamecube title, I’m making the main protagonist, Kalas’s, weapons.

This will be my first of several Baten Kaitos projects as several of my friends and I are planning a group for Youma this year, so I’ll have my own new cosplay to work on, as well as some items for at least one other member of our group.

I don’t have as many progress photos of these that I can find, since I’ve been working on them periodically for the past several months.

The base of both blades are MDF, and there are some wood elements for each one as well. I used a dowel that I split up the middle for the knife handle so that it would be round, and I used thin plywood pieces for details on the sword, to help with stability.

For the hand guard on the knife, I used a piece of cereal box with worbla covering both sides. I heated up the whole thing and shaped it around a marker to get the curved bit on the end.

For the rest of the details on the sword, I used layers of craft foam, and some wooden tokens that I got from my orthodontist as a kid XD

As per usual, a lot of sanding and mod-podging ensued, until I could paint these suckers!

And here we have the finished products!

Along with that, I have another finished project, which is something I’ve made twice before already. I’m referring to Isabela’s Jewelry from Dragon Age 2.

This was the first time I made this, nearly 5 years ago, as one of my first commissions. It was made out of craft foam, model magic, and cereal boxes. This time around, there’s still some craft foam for the base, but most of it is worbla. The buggest improvement was figuring out how o shape it such that it was less neckbrace-y. The improvement is… stammering, to be honest.

This was an incredible thing to see just how far I’ve come. I mean I know I’ve improved a lot since I started taking commissions, but to have a direct comparison like this really shows it.

And that’s all I have for you guys! I’m working on a new cosplay for Matsuricon, as well as a few other commissions, so don’t forget to follow my Instagram for updates as those projects come together. And eventually I should be posting them here too.

A Tribute to Nobody

It's throwback thursday again and this week I'm showing off my only Kingdom Hearts cosplay to date: Roxas. It'll be a short entry as I really don't have very many photos, since I wore him a total of... twice, maybe? Also I'm not super into KH in the first place, I really just wanted to make some keyblades, and I liked his design more than Sora's.

As you'll probably notice... I don't have a wig. Why, you ask? Because I'm lazy. It's as simple as that. I put all of my effort into my keyblades that I didn;t really care about anything else so I said "to hell with the wig."
Ironically enough, I did eventually get a wig with the intention of "doing this cosplay properly" but I never actually wore it all together. This was pretty early in my cosplay career when I was still so gung-ho about making new costumes that I didn't often wear any of them more than  a couple of times because I was pumping out new ones so fast. Fortunately, the wig didn't go to waste, because I ended up using it for my Spark cosplay.

The spikes might be a bit long, but it still works.

Colossal was one of the two cons I wore Roxas to (the other being Tekko), and I met a pretty fantastic Axel so we decided to take a couple of photos together, particularly given my choice of keyblades.

As I stated before, the biggest reason I wanted to do a KH cosplay was to have an excuse to make some keyblades, which is why more work went into these than any other part of the cosplay. They're not very clean & polished, but considering how early this was in my cosplay career, they actually turned out pretty well. These are made from cardboard, paper mache, and some craft foam (primarily for details).

The specific keyblades i chose to make were very intentional. Roxas is most often seen wielding a black and white duo of keyblades known as "Oathkeeper" and "Oblivion." The designs are super cool, but because this is the standard pair of keyblades associated with Roxas, almost every Roxas cosplayer out there uses them for props. So, in my usual fashion, I decided I wanted to do something different, whicle still being relevant.

The first blade I went with was "Two Become One." This keyblade is styled after Roxas himself, with lots of nods to his design. The four-pointed ninja star-looking keychain mirrors the metal piece on his jacket, the checkerboard pattern mimics his wristband, and the nobody symbol can be seen on the hilt. To me, this combines some facets of both Oathkeeper and Oblivion into a single keyblade, which had a lot of appeal to me.

The second keyblade is the "Bond of Flame," a keyblade which represents Roxas' best friend, Axel. You actually recieve this keyblade in KH2 after Axel sacrifices himself to save Sora. Given their strong bond (yeah, I ship it) I thought it was a fitting second choice for a keyblade.

And that's all there is for this week, since I'm out of photos, and out of anecdotes.