Lady Thor: second round of photos

Here goes the second round of photos of Lady Thor with the same credit going to Eylin da Cyel:

Skrull version of the Avengers

And lastly, a "street snap" that got taken of us at the Con:

How to be a Happy Cosplayer

I found this (translated into Spanish) on one of my friend´s blogs. They, in turn, found it on Deviantart, here.

It is a really interesting illustrated list of what a cosplayer needs to keep in mind in order to be happy. I especially agree with the one that explains "Life vs. Cosplay"....especially since I had to make that very same choice for this last Con in December: study for my teaching exams, which might determine my future and get me a job....or sew two cosplays for the con. I chose the former, and am very happy about it. In the end, I did get time to complete one of the two cosplays, which isn´t that bad, and still satisfied my cosplay craving.

Do you agree or disagree with any or all of the listed "have to"s?

Lady Thor: first photos

I finally have two photos of my Lady Thor cosplay. I hope to get more soon, since I was lucky enough to get together with an Avengers group who had a wonderful and talented photographer, so.....she took photos of everyone and has promised to photoshop nice thunder effects into Thor´s images!

 

I´m Photoshop-impaired. I really admire people who can manage feats like that. It´s even more admirable when the photographer in question is actually a talented photographer. So, on to the photos:

This photograph is by Eylin Da Cyel. All credit  of photo-taking genius and photoshopping is hers. Here is her facebook, and here is her deviantart (she goes by the name "Whitelemon").

After that, any pictures would look a bit amateur. Here is the other one I currently have (hopefully, more will turn up later).

A full body shot, with Powergirl (who I´s just met) and my Loki. A lot of people found it funny that Thor and Loki were both genderbent and actually getting along well. 

Here´s a crop of my outfit. It´s a shame that my hair is covering my silver discs and cape-brooches (a shame. I really fiddled around with them to make them functional). I´ll definitely be doing a decent 2.0 version of this cosplay for the Avengers movie release in May. 

Tweaking the brooches and fixing my wig´s hair (into larger front braids, probably) will be first on that list. Well, right after fixing the tiara. I dropped it minutes into the con and had to haphazardly tape part of one of the wings so that it re-attached to the tiara (Or rather, the section of the tiara with the wind unglued from the headband I used as a base....). In the end, what worked better than tape was a bobby pin (yep. I was surprised too). My friend Loki also had a similar problem with her horns.....

Next cosplay projects: December 2011

So, I won´t be cosplaying that pumpkin girl this Halloween.......in the end I can´t go to the Con in Barcelona.....what a shame.... *sigh* darned economy.

But instead, I´ve set up not one, but two cosplays in the "to-do" list for December. Sun Xiang has been relegated to next February. Sorry, Lady Sun!!

The two that I´m going to sew and make are:

Aramis, from The Three Musketeers (because I have been fangirling him ever since I read the book in 5th or 6th grade). So.....a crossplay. A complicated one, at that (so many layers! so many textures!). I will have to wear a moustache and goatee, hahaha. S will be my Athos, so we´ll actually be missing one musketeer...the aparently least-loved one, Porthos.....

December cosplay number two will be (*dramatic drumroll*):

Thor, the goddess of Thunder. Yep, the goddess of Thunder. Thor actually gets turned into a woman in the Earth X comics universe. It´s situation that I love, since I adore genderbending, gender awkwardness and wierd situations. I´ll be accompanied by S as Female Loki. We will probably participate in our first cosplay contest with this pair.

Needless to say, I might modify the costume a teensy bit.....if I lower the boot length, I might not look like I have....erm...."thunder thighs"? Never said better. I think that OTK boots would make any woman look like she has huge thighs, personally. So I might end up doing another of "Lady Thor´s" versions instead of this one. One thing is for sure though: I AM making a Mjölnir: no ifs, ands or buts. I want a Hammer of Doom.  I´m getting Madonna flashbacks every time I look at her chest, though. *facepalm*

Princess Zelda: full outfit shots

Well, I hope to be able to take nicer pictures within a few weekends, in my garden. I have to re-do my wig, though, because I unbraided all its sections on Saturday. I was afraid of the wig hair deforming. I´ll make a Zelda Hair tutorial while I´m at it, I think.

Birdie wanted me to poke him. No, really. 


I like how nicely you can see the side-skirt design in this picture.

My elf ears were my favorite part of the whole "makeup" for Zelda. They are so darned fun to wear. Not many people think about it, but her ears are an essential part of her character!!

When Birdies attack. Boy, was it hot in the con. It was even worse when you had to hold a very fuzzy plushie that naturally warms as the day goes on. I literally found the solution ot the problem by using my head.










All three photos were taken by my friend S. yay for the photographer! Though getting a professional photographer sometime would be really really cool, for once....

Zelda Progress: Dress & Painting

I didn´t take any pictures of the making of the dress because it was such a huried process, and had a lot of trial-and error in it. I am never again using a sleeveless dress as a base pattern for a dress with sleeves--it´s too complicated to fit the sleeves in the end, especitty when like me you´re not used to attaching sleeves. *sigh*. Also, I somehow made the dress too big for me, so despite my wish to make it a one-pice, seamless dresss (well, minus the side seams), I had to add darts at the front and back. I also cut the top too muchh: the boat neck ended up being too wide to be held up by my shoulders alone, and showed off my bra straps...luckily, Zelda ties her capelet under her armpits and around her back, so the bra straps and neck weren´t a problem at all. It still bothers me a bit though, so  maybe I´ll remake it sometime.

The finished (sewing-wise) dress, ready for me to paint the patterns on. I drew the designs on first in my trusty silver chalk pencil (which is conveniently erasable with a regular eraser).

Closeup of the rectangular design in silver.
 

After that, I traced over the outline in  gold fabric paint.

I started filling it in to make the solid design I needed.... And this was the end result:

Closeup of the neck area with the embedded jewel section..... I really like that wierd sort of squarish curl at the top. It was fun to paint.

The sleeves also had a square "U" design on them.  It was hard to make a pattern for it; I ended up grabbing a measuring tape and just going with that.

There we go. both sides painted, all designs complete. I averaged around two hours for each side (painting the rectangle design) and about forty minutes per side for the other designs (boat neck, sleeves and front pendant section). Took longer than I thought it would. I had to paint it twice, so that the gold color was "solid" enough, and there was no magenta from the dress bleeding through. All in all, I used about a whole small bottle of paint for this whole project. Whew. 

I haven´t taken any pictures of the capelet...it´s a semicircle, roughtly 70cm in diameter, with two ribbons sewn to the ends. It perfectly reaches my elbows, like it should. I made it using some leftover raw silk from my Mulan outfit and another leftover piece of white cloth that I had lying around. I needed to use two because both of them were too thin to use by themselves.

Zelda Progress: Birdie

Yesterday I went to Madrid to buy stuff. What stuff, you say? I decided just a few days ago that I needed something to give my Princess Zelda cosplay a bit of..."zing". She wears such a simple outfit, poses are limited and it just doesn´t look as "worked at" (although it is) as other more detailed cosplays.

So in order to capture that "woah, cute" feeling, I decided to make her bird/giant chicken. Who, having no appropriate name, has been baptized as "Birdie" by myself (yes, I am so incredibly original).

For those of you who still don´t know what Birdie looks like,  here he is (psst, he´s the one with wings):

The thing is, I´ve never ever made any type of plushie. So this was an adventure.....an epic adventure full of a LOT of trial and error. Yes, tons of it. *sigh* I´ll probably be able to make a bird plushie next time within a few hours, maybe half a day. This time, It´s taken me a day (today) and around 4 hours last night. I lost a lot of time giving Birdie a liposuction this morning (he wa too darned fat. and his head kept going down, instead of his tail. Grah). So, let´s see a few steps in the making-of, shall we?






First of all, you have to cut out the shapes you catually want the bird to have...In my case, I wanted him to have a white belly, so I cut out the "sides" in blue and the belly in white.








Then you sew the belly and the blue sections together...remembering to zigzag stitch after the regular stich because fur has an annpying tendency to lose its hair unless you secure it carefully....

Funny step: turn it inside out. You´re supposed to leave a hole so that you can do this on one end....I chose the tail.

Stuff it. No, really. You´re suppsoed to use real stuffing for this kind of thing, I guess, but since I don´t particularly want to pay extra for that.....I just used regular cotton, the one that you sometimes use in cotton balls and stuff? Only it comes in huge packs that  are in a "roll" and you can easily pull it apart.

This is birdie after getting stuffed at approximately 2:30am in the morning. ---->


He was too fat, though, so in the morning I gave him a liposuction and cut some off his belly--which sadly  involved undoing all of the work I did in the wee hours of the night (minus the beak). Also, in an rather stupid move, I mistakenly sewed the belly fur wrong-side-up......but it looks intentional. Yeah, intentional.

After that, I started on the wings. Yes, wings!! Notice that he has two rather nice ones in the picture--ones that mix blue, white and turquoise feathers. Since I couldn´t get my hands on any fur in that particular shade of turquoise (more like in any shade of turquoise....and I had to settle for pink isntead of magenta fur.....but oh well)....I ignored it.

Here are the cut parts.......some of which I had to re-cut because I forgot to flip over the "wing pattern" I had made .....

Wing number one, sewn and pinned (what an annoying bit of work......)

Wing one, finished! i had to wrestle with the sewing machine, but we made it!!

Wing two, finished!! Shhhh, don´t tell anyone that they´re not exactly alike......spot the differences? Definitely don´t want to make more striped wings anytime soon. Oh, and the underside I made solid white, like Birdie´s belly. It felt more natural that way.

This is birdie after sewing his eyes (an amber gem with a circle in black marker) on, as well as his wings. So pretty!!

Initially, I hadn´t planned to give him feet. However, despite sewing weights into his...erm...posterior (XD) he kept on insisting on not standing up. Hence the feet. Yellow cloth, folded into a trapezoid, sewn by hand and filled with rice to dead-weigh. 

This is birdie after I finished making his collar accesory. Golden chain (metal) and foamy circles, spray-painted with leftover gold paint. He has twelve, the same amount as I have on my belt. <3 The circles are superglued onto the chain. I might get them secured more with some extra tape or something just in case.




So, what do you think? Isn´t birdie totally rocking the cuteness factor? I think that my first plushie attempt can definitely be counted as a sucess!! My parents were pretty surprised when they saw it; my Dad actually loved it (I know, I was surprised too). Do you agree? The only thing I really hated was the amount of hand sewing I had to do to get this done: eyes, attaching the wings, beak and feet......definite bleh.

Say bye-bye to everyone, Birdie!!

Zelda progress: Side-skirt pattern

I really like the new design that Zelda has in this game. I can´t wait for it to be released! I like how simple the design is, but it still has a few details that make it woth it.

One of them is the painted design on the blue side skirt:

The shame about working with an official image when a game hasn´t been released yet is that if there´s only one image, and you still want to do it...you have to get creative. So, basically, i looked at the design and assumed that that was "about half" of the design, and that it´d only be natural is the other "about half" was a mirror image.

I drew it like so:

Then I doubled it on a piece of thin cardboard, so that the design was complete.  Then I cut it out very very carefully:

You can see in the center, I left an area that has a "square" on it....those sections are supposed to be separate, but in order to maintain symmetry and not have those sections wiggle around, I decided to leave them attached and just modify them late when tracing and painting.


Next, I put the design on top of the blue "half-skirt" section....and secured the bottoms agains slipping with regular old tape.


I traced the design onto the blue fabric with a silver chalk-pencil. They´re handier to use and easier to trace with than regular chalk....

You can only vaguely see the lines, due to the flash lighting......but they were pretty visible IRL.This is the moment when I "corrected" the sections that needed to be separate within the design.

I didn´t want to make any mistakes, so I traced the outline first, once more, but this time finally with white fabric paint. I thought about making the design in really light blue, but ran into the problem of having to mix colors...I DID buy both blue and white, but ended up thinking that the design would contrast better if it were in white; plus, it was really really light blue, right? White can work.

 

You can really see it taking shape here--it´s an eagle! or a bird design, at the very least; just like with bird that accompanies Zelda and is supposed to accompany Link as well. I believe that one of the premises in Skyward Sword are bird races of a sort or traveling on those huge birds from one place in the sky to another.

The design after the first coat of paint. By God, that was like pushing a rock uphill.....it took me really long to do this first "filling" because I had to be extra careful and make all the brushstokes even.

Final result, after a second coat of paint! It looks quite nice. I´m debating on whether I should add an extra coat again or not, but frankly I like this look. It´s opaque, the brushstrokes aren´t very visible, and yet it has a slight bluish tint. I had no idea that the dark blue would show up a bit through two layers of white...it´s a really strong color...and yet, that works. Almost like the picture. I´ll just have to attach it to the brown belt now, after I sew those sides again (made them too wide the first time).

So, what do you think? I had to use three different size brushes to paint this lovely!! (You can see at least two of them poking in corners of the pictures, hahaha) I´m quite satisfied; it´s the most complex design I´ve tried painting for a cosplay so far, considering I had to partially "guesstimate" some of it....

Zelda Progress: Belts and brooch

It seems like weekends are really the only time I ever get to work on my cosplays lately. There are only two weeks left until the con, though, so I defintiely need to squeeze in some work on weekdays or I won´t make it!!


This weekend, I advanced on my Zelda cosplay. Firstly, I made the brown belt and the brooch it goes with. Then I also worked on the second, "Golden shield" belt that hangs over that.

It´s the first time I´ve ever made an accesory, to tell you the truth. The brooch is attached to a belt. To make the "brown" in the brooch match the "brown" in the belt, I made two cardboard circles, glued them and covered them in fabric. 

Then I glued the metal part which actually makes the brooch a brooch.

The "gems" are earrings (you can see the little loop....which I left on purpose as it helps me know which side is "up" XD). I found them at Bijoux Brigitte and though that they were *perfect* for simulating a jewel; much more than your typical "plastic ones"...

The "golden flower" design on the brooch was a pain in the *ss to draw, cut and paint.... I ended up making it out of thin foamy and coating it in gold paint. I finally managed even petals on the flower by using an inverted 5-point star  design, rotated and doubled within a circle of the same diameter of the brooch. Gah. But it  turned out perfect, so it was worth it.

 This is what the brown belt looks with the brooch pinned on it and holding it together.Just like it should.

As far as the second belt, I haven´t taken a "finished" picture yet, though it definitely looks great. :) I figured it was too much of a hassle (and expensive and time-consuming) to make a  belt from scratch. So I looked for a likely belt and found a nice silver one at (you guessed it) Bijoux Brigitte. Geez, such a good place for cosplay supplies (LoL) if it weren´t for the prices.

First step: Spray paint the silver belt gold (and decide that I want to buy a silver one for everyday use, hahaha). In a corner, you can see the reference image I printed out...which is like THE only official reference image of Zelda you can find for this game...Guess that´s what happens when you want to cosplay soemthing before its release....

Step 2: in order to get that "shield" look, it´s necessary to, well---fill in the holes. Preferrably with something slightly raised so as to keep it loking like a "shield", somehow. That´s where my foamy comes in again (thank goodness I have oddles left over from my armor last year).

I cut out the necessary amount of circles (12,  with 5sm diameter).

It was originally yellow foamy (though I also have white leftover). That way, the inevitable "shine through" through the paint (and in teh case that it gets chipped) is more easily disguised.

I painted it gold, just like the other pieces.



Oh, curious detail--I painted it (the foamy) with the same gold fabric paint that I plan on using on the dress, in the hopes that the shades will look similar enough. It works out nicely (though the surface of the foamy stays slightly "sticky"...not enough for anything to stick, per se, but enough to be recognizable as "sticky").

Step 3: Attach the circles to the belt. Let dry on a horizontal surface. I used superglue. Love that stuff.

Chakram Progress, Sunday afternoon

After lunch, we decided that we might as well start cutting the chackram. It was going to be tricky: there are several sections in which the chackam blades have whorls and wierdness, which we wounldn´t be able to completely cut with the saw.

So we quickly got started. Needless to say, I´m kinda scared of saws.

My father was mainly here in this part of the process to help me cut. I was (and still am, somewhat) scared of saws--not just because if something went wrong, it could cut my finger off: no, what really worried me was the fact that I could essentially ruin what we´d been drawing the whole morning, as well as damage the wood.

My Dad started the cutting. But in the end, I joined too. It´s actually quite fun, once you get past the initial fear of killing your future chackram by accident.

Smiiiiile! I´ve got a saw and I don´t really know how to use it!! Well, maybe you should run.......

We ended up cutting both giant wheels, since setting up the tools again later would have been quite a hassle.

 

 

They look, amazingly, like tabletops. wierd, spiky tabletops that´ll poke you in the stomach as soon as you try to lean forward to eat your spoonful of soup.

When we looked at the watch, we realized it was only 18:20!! We still had over two hours or time left before our neighbors could actually start complaining about the noise in the garden. What to do, what to do.....???

 START SANDING, BABY!!!

Gosh, but how I do love sanding machines. Nice, pretty, efficient electrical ones. You get stuff done "over 9,000!!" times faster than with manual sanding....and the end result usually looks better too. Not that you don´t have to manually sand sometimes, but I definitely didn´t want to be sanding (p= 2πr times two) 628cm worth of wood by hand. Just thinking about it makes me dizzy. I finished one in about an hour and a bit ( had to sand both sides of the "table" to make the "blade"), so I decided to finish the other one up before 20:30 as well. In the end, I finished at 21 on the dot, but most of the neighbors were still at the pool, so I´m guessing that the noise wasn´t particularly bothersome. Or maybe it was--but they were feeling guilty about their loud parties/shrieking children/both and decided to let me make a racket for once. 

 Safety is important. The goggles were a given--my glasses don´t protect me from flying dust much better than...well....not wearing them. By the middle of the first wheel, I realized the vast quantity of sawdust I was inhaling. Luckily, I had a mask to wear. yay for being able to breathe!!

Sorry for the wobbly picture. my grandma took it. It´s the two "finished" wheels; now the only cuttting left to do is the center. We decided to leave that for after sanding due to the fact that the electric sander sends a lot of vibrations thorugh the wood--and the wood could split/snap/whatever if it´s subjected to too much (and weakened by having a hole through its center). 

Yeah, I look horrible. But I wear those clothes on purpose, because if they die, I won´t regret tossing them.  That´s why they´re "work-clothes"! An old too-short spaghetti strap and some gym shorts from when I was in middle school.