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.