Constant Progress

Hey folks, I'm back again with a WIP wednesday edition of Mikey Does Cosplay. It'll be a short entry this week with my continued inability to show you progress on what I'm making for myself, but that suit of armor I've been working on continues to slowly grow and become more complete. At this point I've finished building all of the torso pieces and now have the tassets done too!

For those of you unfamiliar with armor anatomy, the tassets are the parts that sit on your hips/outside of the upper leg.

So without further ado, let me just show you what all that looks like...

The other fun new things I've started working on are another commissions from my cousin & his fiancee who're doing Sokka & Suki from Avatar the Last Airbender! Thankfully they won't be needing them until next April, so I haven't had to start on the actual costumes yet, but I have made the base of Sokka's weapons and I'm excited to finish them!.

The other update I wanted to tell everyone about is that I've been doing more work on the site, so there are a few new pages and updated info! First of all, I've finally started putting together the Materials section of the Cosplay Help Desk. It isn't complete by any means, but I have started working on it and will continue adding things little by little. For everything on there, you'll see photos of the material itself, an explanation of some benefits and how it can be used, and some examples of things I've made using it (with photos of course). I also have links to where you can buy it online (most of it's through Amazon), and where you can find it in stores, if you can in fact find it in a store.
The second site update I've been working on (though it's not live yet) is a blog index. I'm kind of frustrated that Square doesn't have a tool to do this automatically, or at least not one I've found yet, but I want you to be able to access any blog entry more easily than the current method, which is to go back through all of them until you find it. I thought the "Featured" blog post feature that has them on the main page would keep all of them, but alas it only has the most recent 10. So I've put together the full list myself, tags and all, for your simplified browsing and will try to keep it updated as much as possible! You can find it in the footer below, or right here!

Thanks, my dearies, for stopping in, and Happy Thanksgiving!

Soundtrack to my life

I thought I'd put together a compilation of my favorite nerd music to listen to while I'm crafting, all on my playlist appropriately titled "Nerdgasms". Why? Because I can, duh. And I'm busy making things I can show you until January so I need something to share with you lovely people. I'll even be nice and put links to the tracks on youtube (the ones I can successfully do that with anyway) so you can listen to them, and maybe find yourself a new favorite track!

1. Road of Trials & - Journey Soundtrack (Austin Wintory)

2. Pirates Medley - Pirates of the Caribbean (Peter Hollens & Gardiner Sisters)

3. The Asteroid Field - The Empire Strikes Back (John Williams)

4. Gerudo Valley - Legend of Zelda 25th Anniversary Symphony (Ok, this theme is awesome as it is, but it has never sounded more epic than this!)

5. Waterdrops - Ni No Kuni (Joe Hisaishi)

6. Dry Your Tears Afrika - Amistad (John Williams)

7. Presenting the Hook - Hook (John Williams... what, I like his music)

8. Malcom's Journey - Jurassic Park: The Lost World... ok, no the second movie wasn't as good as the first, but the music is still awesome (John Williams)

9. Skyrim - Skyrim (Peter Hollens & Lindsey Stirling, pretty sure I like this version better than the original)

10. Koume and Kotake's Theme - Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (MOKA)

11. Enterprising Young Men - Star Trek (Michael Giaccino)

12. A Deep Mentality - Persona 3 (Shoji Meguro)

13. Calling - The World Ends With You (Takeharu Ishimoto)

14. Song of Time/Song of Storms - Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (Taylor Davis, she also does lots of other awesome covers you should check out)

15. Soar Up - Kiddy Grade (Sorry, couldn't find a video...)

16. Tank! - Cowboy Bebop

17. Kazenone - Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles (Yae)

18. Baba Yetu - Civilization IV (Christopher Tin ft. Soweto Gospel Choir)

19. aLIEz - Aldnoah.Zero (Amanda Lee - she does a good cover, and the real version doesn't seem to exist anywhere...)

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!