Ohayocon 2016 - Rise of the Mad King

Ohayocon was absolutely amazing! I barely know where to start. First off, one of my oldest con buddies joined me again for the first time in a very long time. And of course she makes the most badass Imperator I know, which helps :-)

Our first set of serendipitous events of the weekend include meeting an awesome Max cosplayer on our way back to the room Friday evening, which delays our journey to our comfy beds by an hour or so but he was so awesome that we didn't mind :-D
Now we have a new awesome cosplay friend who fortunately we managed to find again on Saturday night (again on our way back to the room, but this time to extract the Mad King from me rather than head to bed). Sadly I didn't get a photo of him on Saturday because he was a badass biker version of Rainbow Dash. I did get him along with my Imperator on Friday though.

Second on our awesome new cosplay friends list is another wonderful MMFR pair we found on Saturday. A lovely Capable and an absolutely spot-on Nux. This badass cosplayer made me want to WAAAY up my game next time I cosplay our adorable warboy. Which I have now decreed will always come with me any time I go conventioning with my Imperator so I don't get left out of wonderful photos like this ;-)

The next lovely portion of my weekend was spending all day Friday with my wolf pack, which naturally we didn't get a new photo of, but here we are at Matsuri last year; we haven't changed much.

The word wolf pack seems all too appropriate for us, besides just being an actual pack of Wolf's Rain cosplayers, these people are truly my con family. I can't express how much I enjoy spending time with these nerds. And I'm even more humbled by the fact that they gave me presents. It's too freaking adorable to handle. Among them are my first two Pop! figures ever, including Old Man Solo, and a tiny Tenth Doctor, along with the only Star Wars hat I'll ever need.

I really don't know what else to say, other than to repeat my sentiments of loving the shit out of these fellow nerds.

Further wonders unfold on Saturday when I meet a badass New Monarchy Titan while dressed as the Speaker. Thank god people still like this game.

And perhaps the most miraculous series of events occurred in conjunction with my newest cosplay, the infamous [SECRET COSPLAY] that I've been ranting about for the last... many many months. Which, if you haven't been on facebook yet, it is none other than the Mad King, Ashnard.

The tale begins on Friday night, when our pack was dawdling in the lower floor near registration, and I see a very tall man with long black hair and a white robe go through the registration door. After a moment I start wailing to one of my pack mates that I think I just saw a Sephiran cosplayer, but that can't be right. Who would cosplay Sephiran, that's even more random that Ashnard. So I creep by the exit to the registration area only to ask, and discover that he is in fact a Sephiran cosplayer.

Apologies to anyone with delicate sensibilities. On that note, I now have a twitter which will be full of more swearing, random cosplay photos, and livetweeting of me being a derp and playing video games. Fair warning, spoilers will likely be abundant.

After flipping my shit more than just a little, I find out that he actually is supposed to have a Micaiah and an ASHERA (WTF?!?!?) and they're going to do a little shoot later. *LOUD WAILING NOISES* My intentions were not to be putting Ashnard on until Saturday because I already had a Soren and Lethe there and I sure as hell wasn't about to change at this point in the evening because that would be the biggest pain in the ass ever. We do, however, intend to get photos of these other lovely Tellius cosplayers when we can find them.
Praise Yune, goddess of Chaos, their Ashera was having some issues, and I don't think Micaiah ever even showed up , so Sephiran found us again and told us they were going to try again the following day. SCORE. We were already intending to do FE shenanigans on Saturday to it would work out perfectly, and since they weren't planning on doing their little shoot until the evening, our Lethe could actually finish working on her cosplay.
So everything is going great until the derp brigade marches through my brain and I realize I know neither WHEN nor WHERE they're meeting up for their shoot. *MORE LOUD WAILING NOISES* So we now have a Soren, Ashnard, and Lethe (and a few non-FE folks) wandering around for a good hour trying to find a very tall man in long white robes (we at least thought we remembered him saying something about 5pm). We finally decide we should just take some photos because we're in a good spot with some nice lighting and a blank background because Ashera knows if we're ever going to actually find these people. 

We got some photos with just the three of us (and those first two photos of Ashnard up above are from our little impromptu shoot as well), and were satisfied enough, if annoyed that we were unsuccessful in our search. Well, providence would have it that my dear friend Trickssi was going to be around for a little while yet and we should come meet her in another area of the convention center. I was super excited cause it's been forever since I've spent any actual time with her so we hustled over that direction and who should we meet along the way? CHANCELLOR GODDAMN SEPHIRAN. There are still no Ashera or Micaiah in sight, but he tells us they're on their way. So after a lovely time hanging out with Trickssi and the rest of the Trimeriad, we finally manage to assemble the ranks and successfully do a Tellius shoot. BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE! As we gather up for our shoot, an Ike wanders past (who just so happens to be a friend of a friend, no less) and we manage to wrangle him into our shoot as well. I'm not entirely sure he's a Fire Emblem person or just a Smash Bros person, as he didn't seem super familiar with the rest of our characters, but at this point I couldn't have cared less because the sheer awesomeness of our accomplishment in assembling the team was successful. Here are the fruits of our labor. I'm sure there will be more photos floating around as others start posting stuff, but bless Trickssi for sticking around and taking some shots with my phone (especially as she isn't remotely a Fire Emblem fan). 

Having an Ike around was clearly useful in giving us some actual poses and things, including the lovely awkward prom photos XD
So as you can see, it was a hella good con weekend. I found a bunch of awesome cosplayers, hung out with cosfamily, including some family members I haven't seen in forever, and made some new friends! If you want to see the full gambit of photos I took this weekend, you can find them on facebook in my Ohayocon 2016 album.
You can expect a post in the near future with the trials and tribulations of making the Mad King to be coming around shortly. In the meantime, feel free to enjoy all of the photos (and checking out some new additions to the Cosplay Plans Album (which is growing faster than I can control), and observing the spiral of inane livetweeting on my new Twitter account. The flavor of the month is Mikey Plays Tales of Xillia. Be warned there is no spoiler filter, and also no language filter.
Later, lovelies!

Witness Me!

Hey folks, as promised, I give you the outcome of my weeks worth of endeavors dragging thrift store find along the concrete. I give you the Imperator, the Warboy, and the Bloodbag!

And Max apparently doesn't know what to do with himself. Sadly, there's only one other photo because we were too busy drinking to worry about taking pictures. Don't worry, eventually we'll be wearing these again I'm sure, and maybe we can find an old junkyard or something to take some legit photos. Anyway, here are the furious citadel residents.

And for all the nerd who actually follow this blog, you'll be happy to know I did in fact yell "WITNESS ME" every time I won a Mario Kart race.

The only other thing to report at the moment, is my progress on that suit of armor I'm working on. I'm up to 9 whole pieces! No finishing steps yet, but they are constructed (I want to get the person fit before I do anything else cause they'll be a lot easier to heat & adjust shapes without paint and all that other junk on them. Here's how they look.

That's about all I have to show you for the moment, because although I've been working hard on stuff, half of it is for my [SECRET COSPLAY] and the bits I've been working on are a bit too easily recognizable to share without giving away my identity. For those of you still wanting to guess, this is the wealth of information I've given away thus far: I'm a male character who wields a named sword, and no one (based on my rather extensive internet searching) has cosplayed this character before. I'm also not from Awakening, which I don't think I ever explicitly said, but I have mentioned that I won't be doing any new cosplays from that game. I can also elaborate on the whole named sword thing and add that no one else ever wields this weapon, which is pretty sweet.

One other thing to mention before I'm outta here, I've been working on the materials section as promised, so go check it out through the Help Desk!

Who Killed the World?

Hello dearies, and welcome to a spaztastic WIP Wednesday here at Mikey Does Cosplay. While I'm still recovering from the wedding, I've at least had enough time to dive headlong into my next set of projects. And I couldn't have done so too soon because one of them is a pair of costumes for an Apocalypse-themed Halloween party we're going to this saturday. So yeah, that's been  quite the turn-around, but it has been insanely fun to work on all of the pieces I've put together.

What are these lovely costumes, you ask? Oh, no one special, just the three awesomest characters in a movie that will melt your face off - Mad Max: Fury Road. It all started with my friend who's hosting the party; she wanted to do an Imperator Furiosa costume for the party and recruited my help for constructing the prosthetic arm. It's not nearly as awesome as some of the ones I've seen out there, but given the extremely limited time to put things together it looks pretty awesome.

I put together all of the bits and pieces, she sewed them onto the base glove, everyone is happy. It's made using my usual method of cereal boxes and worbla. Along with some leather pits, acryllic rods, key rings, duct tape, and some legitimate pieces like actual wrenches and a tire gauge. For such a hack job I think it looks really cool.

So naturally, when tasked to make this thing, and given the challenge of an apocalypse-themed party, how could I not immediately try for my own pair of MM:FR costumes to match? Well, Jordan is one who prefers not to wear a wig... and also prefers to have some hair, so he was the natural choice for Max.

As a bonus, he actually owns a coat that looks ridiculously like Max's from the movie (which Nux is wearing in this particular scene). Double bonus, he has a long-sleeved tshirt that's about the same color as the one Max wears, and has already worn it to the point where there's giant holes and it's missing half an arm. Score, I have almost no real work to do for his outfit minus some further weathering on the shirt, and to find a pair of pants at the thrift store. There's also that weird shoulder pauldron that I have yet to figure out the purpose of, but whatever. Either way, all missions were a success! I managed to find a pair of cargo pants at the thrift store and constructed a pauldron for him. The weathering was interesting... I essentially took the shirt and pants out to our concrete driveway and danced on top of them while shuffling my feet as much as possible... for about an hour. I felt ridiculous but it worked, you can see the fruits of my labor here.

I didn't touch the coat cause it's actually a really nice coat, but it already has the right look to it without grinding it into the dirt.

So that really just leaves me, and by now you may have a good idea of what my plans are...

That's right, I'll be donning the lovable warboy, Nux. One of these days I'll stop doing bald characters, but in the meantime this is going to be a lot of fun. The nice thing is it's pretty simple as far as clothing goes. I roughed up a second pair of cargo pants for him, I have a decent pair of boots, and some leather bits to strap around my legs. The rest is going to be make-up magic which I'm both nervous and excited about doing. I'm not the greatest when it comes to makeup but I'd like to get better, and this should be an interesting experiment. The biggest thing is going to be the engine-design scar on his chest. Given that this is less than a fully-legit cosplay of mine, I opted out of creating a chest plate with liquid latex, but if I decide to wear this to a con some time in the future, I may go back and try to do that. I've never used liquid latex though so that would be an other interesting experience to try out. For now, it'll just be painted on and we'll see how it looks.

Of course, we're not quite done because if Jordan & I are doing these two it only seems appropriate that we have the proper accessories.

Yep, Jordan will be muzzled and we'll be attached with a chain and bloodline; things are getting kinky ;-)

I cannot tell you all how pumped I am for this weekend. I will definitely post some photos of the full crew all done-up once I get back, you can count on seeing those either here or on facebook early next week. And naturally, that's not all I'm working on right now, but the rest is taking a back-burner until I get this more pressing stuff done. Needless to say, there will be lots more happening here for you to see in the coming weeks!