Coming up next....

Next costume(s) I will be working on: The Monarch and Dr. Mrs. The Monarch. I am hoping to get them started early in the new year, as I will have two full costumes to make for wearing to cons/halloween/by myself like a boss, etc...

This will be my first excursion with thermoplastics and possibly epoxy and airbrush painting, new skills for the new year, wooo!

More blasts from the past

The previous pictures were all from stuff I did in graduate school. I went even farther back in the way back machine and found pictures of two of my costumes from college.


I don't have pictures from freshman or sophomore year, but those years I was trinity from The Matrix, and a Demoness, respectively. I wish I knew where a picture of the demoness was because that was a cool costume. I made a wig with horns, sewed big fabric spikes onto a top, and made a huge tail. I still have bits and pieces of that costume laying around in my dresser I think.

Junior year, 2005, I was Willy Wonka from the Tim Burton version of Willy Wonka. I made the costume before the movie came out (as I also did with the Quorra costume). The pants I had, bought go-go boots (which were later incorporated into the Quorra costume), and the hat I bought (and still have, vintage top hat). The rest I fabricated. I got my dad to cut the W pin out of aluminum, and I sewed the coat and the top. The top mimics a waistcoat and shirt, although you can't really see it in the picture. The cane is made from a dowel, that my dad shoved into a bit on a giant drill press, and then sanded while the drill press was running. That was fun, broke at least one in spectacular fashion that way. The top of the cane is a painted bouncy ball hot glued on. I wore the costume all day, and walked around with a huge bag of candy, giving it out to people in class.

Senior year, 2006, I was a "warlock" from WoW. That's World of Warcraft. I have been characters from 2 of 3 of Blizzard's cornerstone games, no Diablo costume (yet). I guess my previous statement of not having original costumes is false, because the demoness, the warlock, and the blue fairy are all original concepts.

I actually welded for this costume, the back piece is a metal frame, with chain draped in between. The dress I made, along with the arm things and the hair is my hair. Braided into yarn to make yarn dreads. I had a yarn in hair phase, because why not? I did it about 4 times within a year (including the blue fairy) for costumes and funsies.




 I had to go digging through my email for these, but I found some pictures of my Quorra costume from 2010. It was the first costume that I made that lit up, with EL wire running through the front and back. Unfortunately, no pictures of the back (that I can find right now, although I've seen them somewhere).

I do have an identity disc that velcroed to the back that can't be seen in the pictures, and the costume is one whole body suit, and the white piping is pretty much all hot-glued on to the suit. The sleeves are attached and not separate. This was fun to do, and it is easy to wear, unlike a lot of my costumes. If I'm going to wear it again, I want to get a wig to make it more authentic.

Blasts from the past

 While I'm in costume downtime mode, here's some pictures of Halloween's past. I don't have any pictures of my 2010 costume for some reason, although I still have the costume. It was a Tron Legacy costume, the suit worn by Quorra. Maybe I'll find a picture of that later.

Anyways, 2007, to the left, I was a Blue Fairy, although with the giant peacock wings, most people thought I was a peacock. This is probably one of my only true original ideas, and I made it in maybe 2-3 weeks? This was the first year of grad school, and it was the first year I made it on my own without anyone's help. Also the first year I made wings. Fairly rudimentary design, but it worked for the costume. Yes, I am wearing that in a lab.

 2008, I decided to be Dark Helmet. Space Balls is one of my favorite sci fi satire movies, and one of my all time favorite movies hands down. I still had the helmet, which is paper mache, until recently. It had started to really break down, and was getting really sad. I still have most of the rest of the costume, although the boots were cannibalized for the Commander Shepard costume, so if I were to ever be Dark Helmet again, it would require some major reconstruction.

Gloves I bought, shirt I made, along with the shorts and tie and cape. The pants are spandex I had. Again, it didn't take me as long to make this as more recent costumes, and it was mostly sewing.

 2009, I switched gears and decided to be Marie Antoinette. Mostly because I wanted to make a huge dress. This costume probably has the most money in it, due to the expensive brocade material I decided to make it out of. It turned out really well, but I only ever wore it once on Halloween of that year. It is huge and bulky and hard to move in. However, I'm hanging on to it, just in case I ever have occasion to need a huge dress.

It did sustain some damage being worn out on halloween, and I only recently pulled it out to clean it, but again, with some small fixes, totally wearable again.

2011, I did a complete 180 turn in the direction of my costuming and was the Queen of Blades. Previous costumes had mostly been fabric and sewing, and I wanted to expand my costuming skills repertoire. This was the first year I worked with foam and paint, and it came out decently.

If I wear it again, and I probably will, it needs a lot of reconstruction with the wings, and fixes to the paint and boots. The costume needs a lot of small fixes to be wearable again, but they are easy and will make it look a lot better.

2012 was Commander Shepard, which I posted about a ways back, and this year was obviously the weeping angel.

2014 and beyond: who knows. I'll probably also start to make things all year round at this point.

Halloween: complete

The costume is complete, and Halloween is over. The costume turned out great, and I scared the pants off quite a few people. Only problems were the mask and the wig were very tight and ended up hurting my head after awhile. Max wear time for this costume is about 3 hours before it gets too uncomfortable. It will be worn again in the future, either to a con or any other event that requires a scary costume.


Probably won't be a ton of activity in here for awhile, until I start my next costume project. Next up (I think) is The Monarch and Mrs. The Monarch, from Venture Bros. I am also planning on restoring the Queen of Blades costume, and re-engineering the wings and wing attachment so I can wear it again some time. Also in the planning stages is the long fall gravity boots from Portal 2. I really want those boots.

Happy Halloween!

Don't Blink

Getting into the halloween spirit

I bought a couple of pumpkins a week ago to carve, and finally carved one last night. In keeping with the theme of Dr. Who for Halloween, I carved the new TARDIS logo into the pumpkin, with BAD WOLF around the logo, using the DW as the middle letters. Unfortunately it is sort of hard to see the carving with the lights on, as the carving around the DW is very thin, I will try to get a picture up where you can see it lit up from inside.

I also cut out and started painting a couple of tombstones to put out in the front yard with me. One will be for Rory and Amy, and one will be for Clara. I am a huge nerd. Themed Halloween.

Painting...done?

Almost done. Just tweaks and small stuff left to do. The back of the dress is done and painted, and I added on "bow ties are cool" in Gallifreyan. I "tagged" my statue costume with Time Lord graffiti.

Pictures of the whole thing on will probably appear once the dress is totally dry and I've fixed any and all problems.                                  

So much paint

Dress is taking forever to paint, and is using so much paint. I ran out last night, after painting the top on the back of the dress. Luckily for me, I ordered paint off Amazon Tuesday night, so paint will magically appear at my house today. That will hopefully be enough to finish painting the skirt and any places I may have missed. It's taking a long time since I can paint a large area, but I have to wait for it to dry overnight to turn it over and paint the other side. Then run out of paint. Hopefully tonight is the last dress painting session.

Finished wings, sewn dress

Not a lot of updating recently, but there has been significant progress. The wings are fully painted, their color is matching now, and all that is left is to attach fabric to the base to hide the sockets.

I buckled down this weekend and sewed the dress pretty much all in one go, which took probably about 8 hours. A lot of pinning and eyeballing things later, a finished garment appeared. I ended up sewing the skirt and the top separately, and then attaching the top to the skirt, creating gathers along the hem line. Way more complicated than it needed to be, but that's how I roll.

Turned out not too shabby, although somehow the bottom gathers of the top all sort of pull towards the front, and despite ripping out the seam multiple times and repositioning the gathers, still did the same thing. Guess I can't fix that problem, oh well.

One thing I really need to do in the future is pattern before I start sewing, it will definitely make my life easier and the construction go faster. I also need to learn how to properly put in a zipper, because they are the bane of my existence. Most of the time I was sewing was putting in a seam, looking at it, tearing it out, and redoing it. Correcting mistakes probably took at up at least an hour or two of my time.

After the dress was done, I figured out where to put the slits for the wing sockets, and cut those out and sewed down the edges. I test fit the harness under the dress, and luckily I don't have to adjust anything. The harness is a bit bulkier under the dress then I wanted, but I'll live with it. As you can see in the top right, from the front, you can't see anything of the harness, and that is the most important part. The harness does pull the back of the dress away from my neck, but nothing too funky.

Last night I started painting the dress. It's going to take awhile, and unfortunately I can't fit the finished dress over my dress form. The shoulders of the dress form are just slightly too large for it to fit without ripping a seam. At least for the front I'm painting on the form, but I'll take it down and put cardboard into it to give it some rigidity while I'm painting and paint the rest of it that way. I also have to lighten up the paint job on the front, the mask is appreciably lighter than the dress at the moment.

Luckily the dress is easy to paint, highlight the folds, lowlight the creases. Unluckily, there is a lot of dress, and a lot of fabric, approximately 4 yards worth. Now to see if I have enough paint or not.

Wing Progress, Pt 5

Wings are now mostly painted. Drawback to mixing paint to get the shades of grey that I want; one wing looks lighter in color than the other, going to have to fix that. Aside from tweaks to the wings, they are mostly done. I also still need to fix the sockets and make them a tighter fit.

While waiting for the paint to dry, which is enthralling, I started on the dress. I had cut out fabric for the neck line a week or so ago, so I sewed that to make the base for the rest of the top. Then I started draping fabric and pinning it how I wanted.

I ended up pinning all the fabric for the back, and started pinning the front, although I'll probably fiddle with the front for awhile before I decide I'm happy with it. The waist band will be elastic to increase drapey-ness and comfort.

All in all, things are starting to come together. The dress is probably going to be way more complex than it needs to be, but that normally happens when I make things.

Wing progress, pt 4

Paint, paint, paint. Painting is taking a long time, since I can only do one side of the wing at a time. I also have to let this one dry before I can move it and start painting the other one. Then do both back sides, and probably repaint some of the front. 

Set up my sewing machine though, so I can start in on the dress while I wait for paint to dry. 

To do list update

Back in the first post on this project, I wrote down a to do list. I figured that now would probably be a good time to look back at it and update that list. Now let's see:

Old to do:

Make a wig, paint the wig
Since I don't want to do any body painting, make gloves/neck cover out of tights
Make the dress - one of the largest pieces, but a fairly easy day of sewing
Paint the dress
Make the wings and the harness for the wings

Things I can check off: wig, glove and neck covers, wing harness

In progress: wings, currently painting and sanding

Not yet started: Dress

Good progress so far, but I've only got about 3 weeks left until Halloween, it's time to get my butt in gear on the dress. The dress is the largest and most important part for you know, being clothed, and that is probably important.

Wing Progress, Pt. 3

Foam, foam, foam. Craft foam has a really weird smell that gets into everything it touches it seems. Did a lot of cutting and gluing last night, and the end result is what you see below. One wing is now entirely covered, hooray!

The next step, besides getting the other wing covered, is to sand down offending edges, and create details in the feathers. Unfortunately the pictures don't show much of the detail, as all the feathers are blending in together, but the whole inside face is individually cut and glued feathers.


Probably going to get the other wing done first, then just go to town with the sanding. I need to make some adjustments along the area of the sockets, but that's just fine tuning at this point.


I was worried that the skeleton would not provide enough rigidity, but I made the bottom feathers out of two layers of craft foam glued together, and that seems to be fairly solid. Give it a couple of layers of paint, and it should have almost no wobbles.

Wing Progress, Pt. 2

I have started to cover the wings in foam. Finally. I have a cold, which is making it difficult to be motivated enough when I am home to work on the wings. Despite the cold, I did manage to put a final bend in the wings and start the process of turning the frame into something that resembles feathers and wings.

After doing another wear test, I realized that the wings, being mounted at an angle, were sticking out way far behind me. The pipes were bent all in a flat plane, and that wasn't working for the overall aesthetics of the wings. Thus, I bent down the sides, and I think it's turning out pretty well now.

Covering the top portion of the PVC with craft foam took longer than I thought it would. It also left more seams than I thought it would. However, I do own a dremel, so I've started to sand down any really big seams or edges with the dremel before I start painting. Once I am finished with all the foam, I am going to use a paint/primer spray paint that is meant to lay down thickly so I can sand down any seams further after one coat. Then more paint, a second round of sanding, and potentially more paint/primer. Then the detail paint. Then done?

Also started adding on wire reinforcements for the foam. The long side wires will be reinforced so they aren't so wobbly, and they are actually shorter now than they are in this picture. I tried it on after I added the long wires, and realized it came down to mid calf. A bit too long for my liking.

Shortened up those wires, and started tracing out the big long feathers that will make up the bottom part of the wings. Hopefully I'll get more of the foam cut out and onto the structure tonight, as long as I'm not incapacitated by too many coughing fits. Colds suck.

Wing progress

Wing update:

I completed the bending of the PVC for the upper wing structure. Both the harness and part of the wing structure were made out of PVC since I can bend it into the shape I want. Other wings that I have seen on le internets have visible seams from being glued together cardboard or foam. I'm hoping to avoid that by laying down foam and/or paper mâché along the top, making a seam free wing. 

The rest of the wing will be roughed out with wire. This is to reinforce the cardboard and foam which will make up the rest of the structure and feathers.  Once I get everything in about the place I want it, it will be time for paint, and then glue everything. 

Mostly happy with the shape and how the frame turned out. They are almost symmetrical, which I was worried about. I don't want one of them sticking up higher than the other. Before I bent the pipe, I did a wear test, and put on the harness and had my very patient partner socket the wings in. Not too heavy yet, they should be comfortable enough to wear for a couple of hours without much pain. Although I will have to have my partner put the wings on and off, since I can't get them on and off without him. Therein lies the problem with wings. At least I will be able to get everything else on and off by myself.

Commence dress?

So I thought perhaps to start on the dress last night, get that going since it is going to be a long and tedious paint job once it is sewed. Cut out the material for the neck line. Looked at the state of my crafting area. Major clean up required to move the sewing machine onto a spot that is usable. Despair.

Long story short: I cut out some material and then lost all motivation to do anything else, made the smallest iota of progress.

Wing harness

The wing harness is done. Well, almost. The wooden pegs will need to be covered in foam to make them fit snugly into the wing sockets. They are currently too skinny, so just need to pad them out a bit. 

How I made the wing harness: I started by measuring out and cutting a piece of cardboard to rough out how big I should make the piece. Turns out my back is not as long as I thought. Measure twice, cut once. I've seen other wing harnesses that have been made by attaching PVC to a hard board, but I wanted something I could bend and mould to the shape of my back to make the profile under my dress smaller, and to make it more comfortable to wear. I went with making the harness out of a frame of PVC. I cut four lengths of pipe to the cardboard mock up, and fit them into the socket things I can't remember the name for. Brain, stop being forgetful. Thus I ended up with a rectangle of PVC. 

The bends in the PVC were accomplished with a heat gun, and the respirator mask I had been waiting on last weekend. The pegs are a dowel, cut to some arbitrary length I decided looked good. To set the pegs, I heated the PVC until it almost burned, and then pushed the peg down into the pipe. This ended up working pretty well. The pegs have been secured with an obnoxious amount of hot glue and crazy glue. Those suckers should not be going anywhere. 

I attached some small pieces of foam left over from the commander Shepard costume to make the points of contact more comfortable. Last but not least, I sewed on the shoulder and waist straps. Voila, wing harness.

I started bending the PVC for the wings, but I only did the first bend to get the pipe into the position I wanted it to be in to attach to the harness. I wanted the harness done before I got into shaping the wings so the shape when mounted is correct. 

Wing harness down, wings and dress to go. 

Head.....thingy

The saga of dealing with pantyhose continues. Oye. At least I'm almost done with it now. I started and finished the head cover last night. Easy, right? Pffff. Nope.

The head piece is to cover the areas of my face not entirely covered by the wig or mask, and to cover my neck. I'm not entirely sure how I'm going to attach it to the dress or to the gloves, but I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.

I put the pantyhose on my head in front of a mirror, and then cut out fabric around the face to make the face opening. I may have accidentally cut a few hairs, oh well. I marked off where to cut the end on top of my head with a bit of thread, and took it off. I put it on the foam head, and went around the edge with nail polish to seal it and keep it from running. I sewed the top shut with a bunch of random stitches, it doesn't have to be pretty, just functional.

It took me two attempts to actually get this right. The first time I tried, I ripped the pantyhose and created runs all over the place. Great. Start again.

I ended up stuffing a bunch of newspaper into the top, the foam head is smaller than my head (and I have a small head). This was to expand the pantyhose enough to paint it. The paint job on the top of the head doesn't need to be great, it is going to be under the wig.

It looks weird with the newspaper all lumpy in the top, but hopefully once I take it off, it'll be fine. Haven't done that yet, as it was drying when I went to sleep last night. I painted a small piece of leftover panty hose to cover the eyes in the mask, but it came out too dark, so one more layer of paint for that, then time to glue it to the mask.

This weekend will begin the large construction part of the costume: the wing harness and the wings. I wanted to start these last weekend, but alas, this is the way of things. I guess. Over and out.

Finished the gloves

Here's a picture of what the finished gloves look like. They aren't pulled up all the way, so they are a bit more wrinkled looking than they actually are.

I have never bought fake fingernails before. I have never wanted to wear them or bothered with them for fancy shmancy occasions. Never having bought them before, I did not realize how fast the glue for those suckers sets. Putting the nails on was much more difficult than I thought it would be. Again, you have to wear the gloves when you are doing this to ensure correct nail placement, and to make sure the glue doesn't bind the two sides of the finger together.

I ended up using a combination of the nail glue and hot glue. Words of warning: do not push down hard on the nail when you are gluing it down, otherwise, the glue goes right through the pantyhose, and affixes right on to your nail. Then you end up with a nail glued to yourself over pantyhose painted like stone and you spend the next 15 minutes working to get the nail off your fingernail without destroying the nail on the glove and the glove itself.

Yeah, that happened, not too pleased with what went down. Anyways, after I got that nail off, I was pretty careful with gluing the rest of them down. Also, if you are using hot glue, make sure the glue is fairly cool before you put it on the nail. The plastic of the nail will warp. That also happened. Good thing those nail kits come with a bunch of extra nails.

After all those difficulties, the nails are on, and the gloves are done. Time to move on and make the head cover and get started on the wing harness.

All in all, making the gloves has been much more involved and difficult than I thought it would be. However, the end result is pretty cool, and I'm fairly pumped about how they turned out.

Since I was painting, I also added in some stone details onto the mask, which you can see hanging out int he background of one of the pictures.

Respirator: Aquired

Like the title of this post says, the respirator I ordered came in, and it fits. Important, since I don't plan on poisoning myself making the weeping angel.

It's the little things. Not much else to update on, but come the weekend, there will probably be more progress.

Suffering for my art

Never let it be said making costumes is easy. this weekend I wanted to work on the wing harness, but I realized that I will need to bend the PVC pipe, and that will necessitate heating the pipe. Heating PVC causes it to release some really nasty fumes, and I don't feel like inhaling those. I currently do not own a respirator, so in the interests of my health, I ordered one and I am waiting for it to arrive before starting on the harness and wings.

In lieu of working on the wings, I started working on the gloves. I read in another blog/series of posts from another person who had made a weeping angel that instead of body painting they made gloves out of pantyhose to simulate stone hands and arms. I thought this was a great idea, since I don't want to deal with body paint. I have experience painting fabric for costumes; my queen of blades costume is heavily painted and most of it I painted while wearing it. Go forth and conquer.

I have made my fair share of gloves for costumes, so I thought, "this won't take long, no big deal". Wrong. Making gloves out of pantyhose is a completely different animal than making gloves out of fabric. I actually had to sew a pair and a half of gloves, the first half being a learning experience as the glove ended up being messy and I was not happy with it. A three hour learning experience. There were pictures in the blog I read on how this other person sewed the gloves, so I tried to replicate the same method, pinning the fabric and then cutting it and sewing it. This worked, but the seams took forever to sew, it was really messy, and, well, it was bad. I ended up with a lot of runs everywhere. Bleh.

Round 2: decided to try a different method. I put my hand in the foot of the pantyhose, and sewed around the fingers once roughly with a running stitch. I then cut the fabric in between the fingers, and used an overhand stitch to close the seams. While this took a long time, the fabric around each finger was comfortable (not too tight) and the seams are nice and tight and pretty. 

This took me about 4 hours. Once the hands were sewn, it was time for the really fun part; painting the gloves. By fun, I mean awful. I cannot stress this enough; have enough paint before you start because once you paint your hands, you aren't touching anything for awhile. I almost ran out before I started on my hands. Luckily I painted my hands last, so I could mix up more paint after I ran out once. 

Painting the gloves requires you to be wearing them when you paint them. I read this in the blog. I know this from painting a previous costume. This is done so that when the pantyhose are stretched over your arms, the paint doesn't stretch and flake off and look bad. What I did not anticipate was how much the pantyhose would stick to me after the paint started drying. Painting the pantyhose took about an hour or so. I took them off when the paint was mostly dry, and it was like ripping off a huge band-aid. On both arms. Ow. My skin was not very pleased with what I did. I'm fairly sure I'm going to be finding grey paint on my arms for days. I'll most likely add more paint to lighten the gloves a bit and add detail to make it look more like marble, but I can do that now without painting myself into the tights.

I also have fake nails to add to the fingers. They are painted and ready to glue, but after today's ordeal, I'm not doing anything else for the evening. For the head cover, I have a foam head to paint that on. No painting pantyhose onto my head. Bad idea.

Finishing the wig

Realized my last post was very stream of consciousness, I need to work on my punctuation and grammar. Oops. Anyways, I got another layer of paint onto the wig yesterday, and I think it's starting to look better. Perhaps even close to real stone. Maybe?

The color is much closer to that of the mask. The light color matches it very well, and I'm liking the shadow effect the darker color has.

To see how far the color has changed, I draped a strand of the yarn over the wig to show the original yarn color, which was a very dark grey. I originally decided to start with a darker color since it is easy to go lighter.

I started on the wing harness, but I'm a little hesitant to start cutting into my PVC pipe. Measure twice, cut once. I'm still trying to figure out how large I need the harness to be, and how much it will show under the dress.

I'm also still trying to figure out the best scheme for the straps and where the buckles should go; should I use buckles, should I use D rings, etc. I'll figure it out eventually, but I might start in on the arm covers first before I finish the wing harness to distract myself from the harder task of the harness.

Wig Progress

So, I have some progress to update on. The wig is now in progress. Well, it's actually mostly done, it just needs some more paint.

     

What I ended up doing was cutting the legs off of a pair of tights and sewing the seam shut in a fairly head shaped manner, it didn't need to be totally precise as I then sewed down yarn all over it. I ended up sewing long (~3 ft) pieces of yarn down the middle from the front of the wig until about 3/4 of the way all the way back the mid seam of the wig. This not only attached most of the yarn I needed onto the wig, it created a nice middle part which the weeping angel has.

After that, it was a matter of getting all the yarn into the correct style, which took me probably about 5 hours. The wig has definitely taken me a lot longer to make than I thought it would, but I think it has come out pretty well. The pattern of the hair is fairly close to that of the reference images I have.

After I took these pictures, I fitted it and realized the curls didn't come down far enough in the back, and in the process of gluing everything down, the wig didn't come down far enough over my ears, so I added more curls to the bottom and more around the front edge.

The curls around the front and edges were made by taking pipe cleaners, hot gluing some yarn down to one end, and then wrapping the yarn down the length of the pipe cleaner, gluing it down to the other end, and then making the pipe cleaner into the shape I want and gluing the curl down on the wig and blending the end into the rest of the yarn. I used a combination of hot glue and craft tack glue.

The bun in the back was mostly sewn down into place as I was getting mad at the hot glue gun (I end up burning myself a lot when I use hot glue) and sewing allowed me to manipulate a lot more yarn at once. The bun probably took me an hour or two to get to a place where I was happy with it. I think it is quite a bit larger than the buns on the actual angels, but close enough. Close enough is what I usually go with when I'm costuming. Perfection usually comes after I finish the costume, realize I'm not happy with a part of it, and then go back in and fix it.

Once everything was in place, and the tack glue was dried, I started painting. It has one coat of paint on it right now, and I thought that would be enough and it would be light enough, but the yarn is very bulky and it soaked in pretty well and darkened back down after it dried.

 I'm trying to match the color of the mask, which is appreciably lighter than the wig at the moment, so the wig is definitely going to be needing more paint, and more than likely a lighter gray. Once I finish the wig, it's onto the wing harness. That is going to be fun and frustrating. Maybe actually make design plans before I start cutting up PVC? Maybe.

Commander Shepard

Hey, not much progress in the last few days, so pictures of the Shepard armor I made last year and wore to comic con this past weekend. First two were taken by a photographer from ABC, @NickDiMarcoABC2, so much better than the average camera.

Picture with the dalek is one of my favorites, mostly because this lady was tooling around in a full size replica of a dalek that she made entirely herself. I wish I had that skill level.

Picture with imperial pilot shows the whole front of the costume pretty well. Also there's a Doctor in the background.

This costume does light up, but since I was walking around during the day and in fluorescent lighting, it was hard to see in the pictures. Only the tiny bit in the belt is light up in the front, the back has most of it. EL wire is my friend.

Oh, and the costume is made almost entirely out of EVA closed cell foam. Exercise mats. If anyone is reading this and wondering. 

Twofer

Two posts in one day on the first day? No way.

I painted the mask.

In direct lighting the painting is sort of cartoony, but with top down lighting, the shadows hit it well, so, done? Acrylic paints don't blend very well, and the paint has been soaking into the clay and drying really fast. Probably should have sealed the clay first. Meh. I can fiddle with the paint for a long time and it probably will only marginally look better. Good enough for now. Onto the next thing.

Why hello there blog

So. Blog. Hello, its been awhile since I've posted anything in a blog, its been since the days of livejournal in the early 2000s. I've been wanting somewhere to post up things about the various costumes I've created over the last few years and the new ones I am currently working on. So here we go Mr. Blog, time to start.

Over the past few years I've been creating halloween costumes that have been getting progressively more complex and using more materials and techniques beyond regular halloween costumes. This very recently progressed into actually going to a comic con and wearing Commander Shepard armor that I made last year for halloween. Maybe I'll post up pictures of that armor in a later post, but for now, I'm starting with the costume currently underway, The Weeping Angel.

I made a Queen of Blades costume two years ago (again, pictures in a later post perhaps) and got a real kick out of actually scaring kids on Halloween. It's supposed to be a scary holiday right? Anyways, I decided this year to make something really scary, that actually creeps me out from one of my favorite shows, Dr. Who. It's popular to cosplay as the doctor or other characters, but not as popular as villains from the show, although I have seen plenty of weeping angels on le internets. I'm trying to go pretty faithful to the reference images though, so that starts with a mask. Since I have no experience with making prosthetics or making anything out of latex, etc (yet!, skills/experience yet to be developed) I went with making the mask out of paper mache.

I considered buying a base mask, but that would create a mouth that i would have to sculpt over and the mask would have weird proportions due to the mouth being open on a mask that was premade with its mouth closed. So I made a really crap model of my face by pressing aluminum foil over my face and then paper mache-ing over the foil. It turned out ok, looking pretty weird without a mouth. You can see the base below, before I had really started to sculpt over it.

Reading other posts on how other people have made the masks, I bought some paper clay (air dry clay) to do the sculpting over the base mask. Progress photos are below, and you can see how I began the sculpt, from top on down. I have some art skills from my past days as a high school art student (I took AP art, got a 2 on the AP exam LIKE A BOSS) but I have never really made clay sculpture before. Turned out pretty decent, I think. I think it took me about 3 hours to do all the sculpting on the mask. It did dry tighter and cracked a bit, but yesterday I went in and filled the cracks and sanded down the surface for painting.

One problem I did create though, there were some parts of the mask that were uneven that I filled in with clay, but it ended up drying and tightening the side of one cheek inwards, so that now the mask is really tight on my face. I might sand down the interior somewhat, but I think this is something that I'm just going to have to live with.

Next step is painting the sucker. I had to wait until the clay dried all the way through, and I laid down a layer of elmer's glue on the inside to seal the newspaper against moisture from when I try and breather through the tiny nose air holes I gave myself.

On the to do list still:

Make a wig, paint the wig
Since I don't want to do any body painting, make gloves/neck cover out of tights
Make the dress - one of the largest pieces, but a fairly easy day of sewing
Paint the dress - this is going to be one of the no fun parts, as the whole thing has to be painted
And finally, the most complex large piece, make the wings and the harness for the wings. I might make the harness before the dress, so if it turns out bulky and needs to be hidden, I can adjust the dress appropriately. Actually, that sounds like a good idea, do that.

The make or break parts of the costume in terms of accuracy are the mask and the wings. Wings are going to be a pain in the butt, but if I can get them fairly accurate, it's going to be good. A lot of weeping angels I've seen don't look that great because the wings are not as accurate as they could be. Judgemental costuming, being elite and such since 2013.

More to come if I don't forget to take progress photos.