Two of Them

Welcome back to another round of Pandemic Props with Mikey! This time around we’re going to take a look at another pair of swords from Genshin Impact that went to two different homes, to be wielded independently. Let’s take a look at the making of the beautiful, but giant pain-in-my-ass-twice-over, Aquila Favonia.

The first thing you’re probably noticing is the mesmerizing blue glow of the blade, arguably the most eye-catching aspect of it, which of course is a feature my first commissioner wants to include. This was the biggest obstacle to work through construction-wise, because it greatly impacts what materials I’m going to be using to make it, and how they’ll have to go together. Additionally I have to think about what sort of lighting I’m going to be using to get the whole blade to light up.

The blade material was pretty straightforward, since I found some light blue acrylic on Amazon which would work well. The biggest downside was that it wasn’t as thick as I wanted and the pieces weren’t wide enough to get the full length of the blade in one piece.
As for the lighting, my first thought was to use EL wire because it lights consistently along the whole wire and has a relatively manageable-sized battery pack. Unfortunately when I tried it, the EL wire wasn’t powerful enough to make the acrylic glow enough to notice. So instead I went with a battery-powered LED strip which was plenty powerful enough for the project! And as a bonus, the LED strips can change color so the blade could be pretty much any color you want!

As you can see here, the acrylic blade and the MDF base with the chunk cut out for the battery pack that will hide in between the crazy hilt wings. The LED strip sits nicely along the edge of the MDF section, which I then used contact cement to attach the acrylic section. To hold everything together and keep the blade in place, I used thin craft foam over the section that didn’t light, with worbla over the foam to make it solid.

In order to get the blade to diffuse the light better, I sanded the surface with a very fine-grit sandpaper and sprayed it with a frosted glass spray.

With the way the hilt wings stick out, they also needed a lot of structural support, so I made them out of foam with a worbla shell, along with the bit that sticks out at the bottom with the glowing gem. That particular piece also sandwiches around the end of the LED strip so the lights will shine thourough the gem there without needing a separate light.

With the structural stuff done, priming and painting are next! Fun story, I realized during my second build that I painted one of the sections the wrong color, so you can play “find the difference” between the two finished swords XD

Here’s a hint if you can’t find the weird spot from the first photos…

Now these two beauties are at their forever homes, and with any luck I will never have to make another one TT_TT

G'raha Mia!

It’s time for more pandemic props with Mikey! We’re actually going to take a step away from Genshin this time (blasphemy, I know), to take a look at the first prop commission I actually got during lockdown: the glowing staff of G’raha Tia’s new digs in Final Fantasy XIV.

And of course I have mmore glowy bits to deal with. And with this one I had very limited wiggle room to hide a battery, because it’s just a long, skinny shaft. That was problem #1 to tackle, so I started with the crystal at the head of the staff. I will admit, the construction on this thing was super janky, but it worked XD

Unfortunately I didn’t do a great job taking photos of the steps I took (probably because I wanted to forget all of my egregious sins), but the basic process was thus:
1) Make an EVA foam crystal shape
2) Dremel in the contours & bevels
3) Heat pieces of worbla TranspArt (the clear worbla… which behaves very differently than regular worbla) over the foam shape
4) Cry in frustration
5) Repeat step 4, as black foam bits stick to the clear worbla as you remove it and then spend several hours trying to sand it out of there, to only moderate success [If I were to try this again, I would hopefully be smart enough to cover the foam with aluminum foil, so that this didn’t happen… and pray to the cosplay gods that the foil didn’t irreparably stick to the worbla itself.
6) Assemble the LED circuit that goes in the crystal (I used bright white LEDs for this, since the blue ones aren’t as bright and I had other ideas to achieve the color I wanted)
7) Sand the LEDs with a fine grit sandpaper to help with light diffusion
8) Wrap the lights in crinkled iridescent cellophane to add interest, fun color sheen, and further diffusion to the lights. Also this helped keep the LED’s in place on the inside of the crystal.
9) Cry some more as you try to attach the two halves of the crystal together unsuccessfully
10) Use spray adhesive to attach a layer of blue plastic grocery bag to the outside of each crystal shell half
11) Now try attaching the two halves again, with much greater success (they’re literally hot glued, btw… not a recommendation but it did work well enough because the heat made the edges of the worbla pliable enough to flex in helpful ways along the edges)
12) Cut away the excess plastic bag
13) Cry some more because you actually managed to cobble this #$%#@$# thing together

So, here’s the photos I do have!

That’s all for today! Hopefully the next one will have a wider array of in-progress photos so you can see what I did instead of read through my struggles. On the bright side, I have photos of this prop in action!

The delightful Nihohoho makes such a wonderful G’raha Tia! The costume is from Taobao.com and the photos were taken by BlizzardTerrak Photography.

Mikey, but Magical

I’m excited to be introducing you all to my magical OC! Unfortunately while writing this blog post for the first time, it didn’t save so I lost the roughly two hours of work I’d been spending on it TT_TT
So I apologize if this isn’t as thorough or witty as the original because I don’t know that I have the energy to do it as well for the second time.

Anyway, let’s meet Mikey! And yes, his name is Mikey too, which I’m sure you’re considering my utter lack of creativity here, which I can’t exactly refute lol. However, the primary reason is that this particular character is essentially another aspect of my real self. You can think of him as the me that would exist if magic were real, the particular brand of magic that exists within my fantasy version of Earth anyway. I do plan to discuss that magic at some point down the line but frankly it’s kind of convoluted and I don’t even understand wat I’m doing with it half the time so it’ll sake a lot more thought and consideration before its in a state that anyone else will be able to understand. However, when I do eventually post it, it’ll be in the “Research Notes” section of my cryptozoology page. There is currently another post there which is relevant, on planar theory and the nature of the soul, if you feel intrepid enough to slog through my inane babble.

Anyway, let’s actually get to the part you’re actually interested in: me dressed as a fly af mage ~_^

While I’ve assembled a number of outfits for my mage-self over the years, this is my most recent and one of my favorites.

Now you may be wondering at this point “what type of mage are you?” Well those of you who know me well probably already know that I am a cryptozoologist, meaning I study magical and extraplanar creatures, hence the field guide I’m assembling here on the site. If you’re wondering why I would dress like a glimmorous fop when working with dangerous and powerful creatures, the easy answer is: I don’t. While I love my research, it’s not the only thing I do, and as such I need other outfits to suit other occasions. The concept for this particular outfit is that I’d wear it when socializing with other mages. I went for a snazzy and detailed look, while incorporating my eccentricity into it as well.

I love a good vest, and this particular one fits the bill well for this outfit.

Now, being the twig of a man that I am, most store-bought vests only fit me in one of two directions. Those that are properly sized around my waist are inevitably too short and sit way above my pants; similarly, those that are long enough to fall where they ought to would usually fit about 4-6 of me in them. Now we all know I can sew my own clothing (this is a cosplay site for heaven’s sake), and I have made myself a vest pattern that fits me well and used it quite a bit because, as I said, I love a good vest. However, I’ve had this particular vest for a while and like it quite a bit, so I seized the opportunity to do some altering to suit my needs, rather than building a new one(though you can be sure that some time down the line you’ll be seeing another absurdly fabulous vest for this character that I will be making from scratch). This particular vest was of the “fist sideways but looks like a belly shirt” variety, so I decided to add the border along the bottom edge, which adds a fun layered look and gave me some blank canvas or some fun embroidery. I also added the welt pockets with the same fabric as the bottom border to help tie things together, and because I love welt pockets even though they’re a giant pain in the ass to make.

Now the embroidery I did along the bottom is actually relevant to my magic, so let’s take a bit of a detour to talk about that. First, I’d like to introduce you to Tsu’mat, my fellow cryptozoologist and research partner.

For those of you who’ve read my field guide entry on drive imps, you may already be aware that they are very skilled at enchanting (imbuing objects with magic). As we grew closer working together, I gained a great appreciation for his skills in enchanting and over time learned how to perform some of the magic myself, though I often rely on Tsu’mat’s help when enchanting my own items. One facet of enchanting that really resonated with me was enchanting using thread, as I already sew and stitch quite often. By imbuing my thread with magic as I stitch things, they function as enchanted items in a similar fashion to enchanting trinkets or other objects, but because of the act of channeling my mana while going through the act of stitching designs worked much better for me because of my familiarity with needle and thread. [Side note, I just recently finished the first book of Circel of Magic by Tamora Pierce and loved it, in no small part due to Sandry’s thread magic!]

This is the bottom border section I added to the pinstiped vest, it contains 3 celestial guardians: the lunar wolf, the solar serpent, and the twin stellar raptors. Unlike most of my other enchanted items, or even my other enchanted embroidery, these pieces do not have specific spells woven into the fibers. Instead, they serve more as magical conduits to the celestial beasts. While I can’t necessarily activate the magic in the stitching to produce any sort of concrete effect, it offers a more vague protection and enhanced flow of mana from their respective celestial bodies. More than anything it connects me to the cosmos and provides some amount of comfort in that association.

Another interesting part of the outfit is the chain attached to the vest, which you’ve probably already guessed its function after the previous discussion.

Styled as a faux watch chain, the myriad of charms along it length are all enchanted to perform a variety magical tasks, some of which are significantly more complicated than others. Eventually I plan on devoting a post to what each of his charms actually do (since I haven’t actually come up with a specific purpose for some of them yet), but I’ll save that for another time. I took some inspiration from Ryan La Sala’s Reverie, another amazing book you should all read. One of the characters has a charm bracelet with magical baubles and I decided to style it more for myself, and dug up some of my steampunk roots. Additionally, the beaded spider serving as the anchor for the chain is by Amanda’s Arachnids, one of a few of her lovely spiders that I’ve purchased over the years. It is itself a species of magical creature which will eventually be added to the cryptozoology field guide.

Aside from enchanting baubles and stitching, he also collects a variety of magical objects from across the multiverse; here you can see me reading through the Book of Rites, a tome originating from the same plane as my research partner. Much like my many enchanted charms I would love to take some time to show off his collection (particularly because I made many of the objects) but that seems like it’s better left for its own post.

I think that’s a great place to leave things for now, I hope you enjoyed learning a bit about my magesona! I plan on doing a few more posts in the future, particularly because I’ve been working on a new outfit that is a good bit different from this one. Until then, stay safe and see you next time!