I'd rather be napping

Another week gone by and it's time again for Throwback Thursday!  This one's going pretty far back, and I'm sure it comes as no surprise that it's a Fire Emblem cosplay, since I figure I need to work one in every so often so when I run out of other costumes you won't just get a long string of them haha.

This is definitely one of my favorite FE cosplays because he's one of my favorite characters, and I'm pretty confident that I'm the only person to date who has ever cosplayed him. I'm referring, of course, to the one-eyed wyvern rider Haar.

Haar has always been one of my favorite characters in Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn, partially for his design, partially for his attitude, and mostly for the fact that he's a doom machine. He is pretty much one of the only two axe-wielder I use in those games, along with Kieran (since Boyd is such a delicate flower).

Putting Haar together was an interesting journey, since it was one of my earlier cosplays, and it was the first time (and really only time thus far) that I've tried making faux armor. Thankfully, the cloth parts were pretty easy, and the armor covered some spot that let me cheat on some bits.

The tunic I made covers just the underneath parts, and the panel that hangs in the front is a separate piece that buttons onto the front. The tunic itself has a huge head hole and is sleeveless (cause I was not very good with drafting at that point so that tended to happen a lot). Fortunately, the armor covers everything up there so I could just use a black collared shirt underneath the tunic and you'd never know it wasn't all one garment! Wow am I lazy XD

Well, that may have been partially because I spent all of my time and energy on the armor, cause it was a doozy. I used craft foam and poster board to make all of it. Thankfully most of the pieces only needed to curve in a single direction, so I would cut out the foam piece for the back, slather on some mod podge with a paintbrush, then stick it to the poster board. To get it to hold the curve I needed, I'd wrap the piece around a large cardboard tube and rubber-band it on while it was drying. Because of the thickness of the foam, when it dried it held the curve! There are lots of great tutorials online for this and similar methods for craft foam armor, so I won't go any more in-depth with the details, particularly because I never took any progress photos while I was making it. I think this was the tutorial I used, though I didn't follow it exactly and used some different stuff in parts, nevertheless it was a good starting point for me, given that I had no clue what I was doing.

The axe was another fun thing to make cause it's just so darn big. It's all cardboard & paper mache, though the pole at the center is pvc. Very simple build & paint, which is why you can see the contours in the paper mache pieces if you look closely. Thankfully it still photographs well so you'd never know.

The great thing about wearing Haar was that all I had to do for posing was look sleepy XD

The downside was that I wore it to Otakon in the middle of summer in Baltimore... cause I'm a dumbass. Seasonal planning for cosplay hadn't really occurred to me yet so I spent the day nearly dying of heat stroke. Live and learn. The other issue was that we never actually did much of a photoshoot so these are the only 2 pictures I have of him. I definitely want to wear him again in the future so I can do a real photoshoot and get some good quality photos of him, because he really is one of my favorite characters, and for all of the work I put into this costume, he deserves some quality photos. Hell, I'd pay for a professional photographer with this one.

That is not going to happen too soon though, as his armor got a lot of wear and tear at the con. Also, being a newb at the time, I didn't think to use black or white foam for the base because the packs of large sheets I found at the store were all multicolored, so the base foam is all bright green, red, yellow, & pink. Needless to say, it's super obvious in the spots where the paint has worn off

not so subtle...

So thankfully I've learned my lesson, which I will now pass on to you: use foam that's roughly the color you're painting it!! Or use black, because the dark won't show up as obviously as the wierd-ass colors I used.

So, slowly but surely I'm working on repainting his armor so I can wear it again, I'm thinking of maybe shooting for Youmacon on October or Ohayocon next January. No more summer cons for Haar, he'll (I'll) sweat to death.

Well that's all for now folks; later, lovelies!

Not quite a Sharkzooka, but still pretty rad

So my first experience with LEDs in my props turned out pretty fantastically with the Fishbones rocket launcher from League of Legends. To be quite honest, it's pretty hard to top that, but one of my more recent commissions was pretty intensive and awesome too. I was contacted by a client of mine who I'd made a shield & sword set from Majora's Mask, and she asked if I could make a Clank for her brother. As in the little robot sidekick from Rachet & Clank. I certainly was not going to pass up the opportunity so continue expanding my horizons with this project, despite it being a rather daunting one.

He doesn't look so complicated... right?

My first thought was, this shouldn't be that hard, I've built all kinds of wierd stuff before. Well, that was before I realized that in order to be very effective with him, I'd need to make him posable, as in all of his joints needed to actually work. On top of that, his legs would have to fold up into his body so he could be worn around like a backpack. And the last fun thing: in order to be properly proportional to this Clank, he'd have to be about 3ft tall. Oi.

 I had a perfectly good idea how to make most of him right off the bat, carboard and foamcore would be just fine for the body, foam with paper clay over it would work well for the legs, and I could use craft foam for the raised planes. The real trick would be getting the joints to actually move. I had only a vague concept of how that would work and what bit & pieces needed to go together in order to achieve that. So, my first stop after picking up some paint & foamcore: the thrift store.

And I came home with these things.

I know, you think I'm crazy, right? Well that's probably true, but they did actually come in handy for constructing some of Clank's joints. The wierd little alien's legs moved in and out, which I could steal their mechanism to use in his ankles, and their spherical-ish shape worked out quite well for that. That Torx thing I ended up using for the shoulders, since I knew I'd need something that could support the weight of the arms and stay in place, while still being able to turn.

Say goodbye to our little toys, and hello to some useful materials with which to make our little robot move. Now unfortunately, I couldn't find any other joints to harvest, but after seeing how they worked, I felt somewhat (or really not very) confident that I could make some joints of my own for the knees and the elbows.

I started with a few different sizes of pvc, some nuts & bolts, rubber washers, and a whole lot of E6000. God only knows how I successfully constructed some functional joints, I might be able to recreate them again if I needed to, but I doubt I could really explain what I was doing... so you can just look at some pictures instead of listening to me ramble unsuccessfully.

The feet were done with my usual floral foam + lightweight putty method, and the raised parts are craft foam. All in all, probably the simplest part of the whole construction.

Add the legs & a box and his bottom half is done!

With the bottom half done, the next step was the arms. Those bits from our Torx toy, plus some dowel rods and giant washers made for some interesting limbs.

The hands were actually fairly simple; they're made from a few layers of foamcore board with some screws for the knuckles and one of those safety eyes you usually use on plushies for the large round part in the middle of his hands. The fingers are just 2 layers of black craft foam with some heavy gauge wire stuck in the middle so you can pose them.

Put it all together with the body, and we have a torso!

And... waiting for things to dry... and there's only so many ways you can keep things level...

So as you can see, nothing within arm's reach is safe when I'm crafting! I'll grab anything that's the right size.. it's a good thing I don't have any pets at the moment, I feel like that could go badly.

Well, you know what's next! It time for a head, and it was, of course, constructed using our favorite project from kindergarten... paper mache-ing a balloon then popping the balloon! I seriously haven't done that in forever and it was downright theraputic.

Apologies if that photo gives you nightmares...

Also, fun fact: that piece of cardboard tubing that I used for his neck, it's the same tube that made up most of Fishbones! I seriously never throw away anything in this house. It's kind of a problem.

Well, now that we have most of the pieces put together, it's time for the final construction and painting! I was moving pretty quickly as I was running short on time to finish this guy and so I did a vary bad job of taking any progress photos of the painting process, but here he is!

As for the bits I didn't discuss... his eyes are two halves of one of those acryllic balls you can get from craft stores. They were very convenient for this cause I didn't have to do much to them since they were already in two pieces, I just sanded the inside of them to diffuse the green light from the LEDS. His antenna is a little metal tube I pulled off of a clock (thank you steampunk interests!) and a big plastic marble at the top that I sprayed red. His jaw is a piece of thick foam that I sprayed silver, with those same giant washers from his arm joints to attach them.

And now for the magical part. He needed to fold up so he could be worn around like a backpack. Well, on the bottom of his boxy body there are two doors with industrial velcro, and on the top of that little box his legs are attached to is the other half of the velcro. When he's standing, you can attach the legs to the outside of the doors, but when you want them to fold inside, you just pull them off, open the doors, and slide the legs all the way up. There's another platform with velcro on the inside that holds them in place!

I swear it took me more time to come up with how to make that work, but functionally speaking, it works better than most of the joints I constructed for him, go figure!

This little guy was certainly a learning experience, but I had a lot of fun figuring him out and putting him together. And I actually got to meet the Rachet cosplayer at Colossalcon which was pretty cool too!

I am thou...

So now that Colossal is over and things are getting back to normal for me, hopefully I'll be a bit a bit more consistent with posting here... we'll see.

So today, I want to show everyone a cosplay of mine that sadly has gotten no love, and sadly will remain that way. I'm referring to one of my most elaborate cosplays to date, so much so that I scrapped it immediately after wearing it because it was too obnoxious to want to wear ever again. I'm referring to one of the most badass looking personas (which is saying something because most of them look awesome), Thanatos.

I decided I wanted to cosplay something form P3 pretty much as soon as I started playing it, and that notion only grew stronger as I progressed through the game and eventually finished it. Since it was one of the greatest games I'd played to date, I decided to be a bit more ambitious than usual with my choice in cosplay.

I absolutely loved the design and since it was more humanoid than a lot of the other personas I figured it was a bit more doable. The real tough part was going to be figuring out how to get 13 coffins to float around me. I decided to try making a harness out of Plexiglas so it would be clear and therefore not really show any of the coffins. The actual coffins were going to have to be lightweight enough to actually suspend using the connector chain with some strong wire, so I went with foam and paper mache.

I made a base for the little saintly figure, I think it was mostly model magic, covered it in aluminum foil, and paper mached over the front of it. Once it was dry, I peeled the paper mache layer off and voila! Hollow saintly figure. The more angular part of the coffins were made from large pieces of  styrofoam that were cut into coffin shapes (it made such a mess I wanted to scream), and then an extra layer of paper mache was put over the whole thing to give it a continuous surface.

Generally speaking, this idea worked, but it would have been better if the large block of foam hadn't been there because it was still too heavy for the harness. I made it work, it just wasn't ideal. I also cut the 13 coffins down to 5, cause I made them a bit too big, and the harness wasn't going to support that many anyhow. The chains were all plastic with some heavy gauge wire in between so it would support the coffins better, but probably just added more weight and made it more uncomfortable.

The rest was fairly simple. I made the strappy harnessfor my head and attached the two mask pieces to it, plus I used a black knit hood to cover my face. That part was a bit too tight too and so I ended up wearing swim goggles underneath so I could actually see. 

Most of the cloth parts were thrifted, besides the weird skirt thing. I had black tights and a black turtleneck as the base with the skirt part wrapping around over top of it, and using the belt to close. I even thrifted the belt and made a new buckle for it.

The last part was the sword, which was primarily wood that I jigsawed into shape and added some craft foam and wire to fill out the shape. The a simple paint job and it looks great!

This is actually one of the better swords I've made. Shame it never goes anywhere with me.

The shoes were also a thrift store find, which let me tell you finding a pair of platform boots with my giant feet is not easy, but I lucked out. I had to sprak them from black to white and paint the gold on by hand, but they ended up looking pretty good.

Then comes the whole costume! I debuted and retired it at Ohayocon a good 4 years ago or something like that (I honestly don't remember when) and had to have my friend who was rooming with me act as a handler. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, I just wish I had some better photos. I also feel like an idiot because I forgot both my gloves and my sword, but no one really seemed to notice.

As you can see we had a pretty decent persona group, and it was before Persona 4 took over and you saw a big influx of those cosplays. And as much fun as it was, I almost immediately wanted to take off my clothes when it was over. The shoes hurt a lot cause they were a bit too small for my feet, I could barely see or hear anything because of all the junk on my head, and walking around will all of those things hanging off of my back was both unconfortable and incredibly inconvenient. God bless my friend Dan for holding doors open and making sure I didn't fall down the stairs.

Besides all that, the actual coffins were such a pain in the ass to store that I ended up throwing them away, the harness too. I have all of his other pieces intact in case I ever want to do anything simpler like make a cape or something that looks like the coffin design... which actually might be kinda cool. Regardless, I'm planning on taking his sword next time I cosplay as Junpei cause he carries giant swords like that all the time anyway, and it'll be a good test to see who notices that it belongs to Thanatos ^_^

Anyway, that's about all for this incarnation of death. Take care, my dearies!