I bought a Dress form!

It's a start! I bought myself a singer, adjustable dress form for when I start sewing. Which will hopefully be soon. I need to get my butt moving on Cassandra and Harley. The summers shorter than I think it is. 

(Don't ignore the watermark. Since I'm bootlegging their image I might as well trade it for site traffic)

I've had a few setbacks. The leotard I bought for Aigis's bodysuit is actually unnervingly transparent. So I picked up a black bodysuit to go underneath. Bodysuits are difficult to get on my body though because I have wide hips, and a lot of butt, so it's hard to get past that point on my body. It's also a low V neck in the back so it doesn't sit flesh against my skin and makes my torso look wider than it is, so I'll need to come up with a solution for that as well. 

I'm ultimately worried about the bodysuit looking tacky if its see through. Maybe I can figure out a way to line it/ corsette it to create a better silhouette.

The other issue I've run into is that the pair of opera length gloves I bought turned out to be sheer. They definitely will NOT work for what I had planned, so I'm back to looking for gloves now I suppose. It's a bit frustrating honestly. I don't remember them being advertised as sheer at all. I was really hoping to get to work on the gloves, and attaching the gauntlets. to them. (I'll be using a lot of velcro I think. Good thing I bought so much).

I also cannot for the life of me find my measuring tape. It's one of those cases where you put something somewhere specifically so that you do NOT lose it, and then you can't remember where that somewhere turned out to be. Ugh. It should have never left my bathroom. I probably need to pick up more now. 

I'm worried about buying fabric. I have no idea how much I should buy, or how to draft patterns. I guess I could guesstimate the latter, and just play trial and error with tracing paper until I like the finished effect. I drew up a corsette pattern for Cassandra based off of another Corsette pattern I found slightly altered, but I still cant do anything until I have measuring tape. Well, that's not true. I suppose I could clean out the sewing machine, read the manual and get it set up. That all will have to wait until after I get over my pneumonia though.

I bought a ton of other little resources though, so I'm starting to get things together a bit at least. Like I said, there will be a lot of velcro holding things together

Aigis - The wig arrived!

My wig came! For Aigis anyway. The other two are going to have to wait. Although, answer me this, how is it that I ended up cosplaying all blonds? 

Anyway, I was so excited when it showed up that I tried it on immediately. I still have makeup on from an interview I had earlier in the day, so I figured I'd take pictures. I tried to simulate the overall effect I wanted to the best of my ability. I don't have headbands or anything else set up for the ear phones yet. I tried on a pair of headphones at one point, but I wasn't fond of how those looked on camera. 

I was pretty excited right off the bat, so I did a smidge of styling and I was off to take photos. It feels weird being blond, even if only for a little bit. 

I decided to see if I could get closer to what the end result will look like by photo-shopping my eyes to about the right color. Overall I'm pretty happy with my wig choice. 

Aigis and Cassandra - The fumes are overwhelming!

Well, I spray-painted today. I figured I'd get those gauntlets going again. My god, they're still not done, but all I can smell is paint. So much paint. I spent the entire day painting in fact. At least it was productive. 

I think it turned out pretty good for my first time. I'm definitely not as great at painting as I am other things, so it's a bit rough. Over all it could have been worse though. Spray-painting was easy enough. I just set up a produce box on the porch, layered newspaper all over it and used it to contain the spray. I also used a respirator, and gloves to protect me. The acrylic was a bit more challenging.

I was lucky enough to already have acrylic paints on hand. I don't to a lot of painting though, so I'm not particularly skilled at it. I also don't have much patience for it. The end result turned out kind of sloppy, but it looks passable in person which is what really matters. It could have been a lot worse for someone at my skill level. At some point I'd prefer to have the ability to cast all of my armor myself. Right now with the birds, and the limited space it's not an option.

The other thing I did was work on the sculpt for Cassandra Alexandra's brooch. My sculpting is vastly superior to my painting. This sculpt took about half the time of the one I did for Aigis. Despite looking more complicated it was actually so much less complicated to assemble than Aigis' earphone sculpt was. I was able to do a large portion of it on one piece, and I didn't have to worry about making it as perfectly round as possible. Nothing I produce at this stage is going to be amazing, and I ended up having to make some changes from what I originally interpreted the design of the brooch to be. Despite that I'm pretty proud of how this one turned out. 

Aigis Cosplay - Gauntlets.

Today I Got my hands on some craft foam, which meant getting the chance to work on some cosplay props. Since I've been on an Aigis kick lately I decided to start with some of the elements of her cosplay. And thus work began on her gauntlets.

You can be sure that at my skill level I took some liberties. I don't really have all of the elements I need to finish them off, and I'm leaving the ammo cases for later (Maybe even another year with all of the cosplays I've roped myself into). It's definitely a start though! Honestly, I think they're probably the easiest portion of her cosplay to manage at this point. I took a lot of pictures of the process, but don't necessarily feel like getting too in depth with it. 

I made a quick trip to Michaels, and picked up several things I thought would help me. Not everything in the picture is new, but it's kind of a compilation of my current assortment of crafting tools. 

I started by measuring the circumference of my arms and drawing up a quick pattern to reference. The pattern included both the width of  each piece of foam making up the body of the gauntlet, as well as the individual pieces to give it depth. 

I cut and traced these smaller elements onto the foam before cutting it out. 

I think the most interesting part for me was working with a hot glue gun for the first time in aaages. It's going to take me some time before I become really great at using one. It worked for the time being. At some point I'll probably redo the gauntlets, but what I ended up with will work just fine for now. 

Also, you guys get to bask in the glory of my Amaluna shirt. 

On another note, I joined a Soul Caliber cosplay group for Con next year. I'll be Cosplaying Cassandra Alexandra.

Aigis Progress - Part one - Sculpting an Earphone

So, all night I spent my time working on a cosplay element instead of sleeping, and preparing for both of my appointments the next day. What can I say? I was on a roll. Luckily I had the forethought to document what I was doing, so I could not only share it with others, but reference it myself later. 

I decided that I wanted to actually sculpt, and cast the earphones instead of building them out of wood, or anything like that. The initial plan is to sculpt them out of clay, create a silicon mold, and cast them in either resin or plastic. I haven't decided which yet though. 

I obviously cannot do the majority of this in an apartment. Especially with birds that are incredibly sensitive to fumes of any sort. Luckily I have at least one lead on where I can go to work on this element once the sculpting is done. Why aren't there any public workshops in Washington? I feel like it'd be so handy for people like myself. 

Anyway, I started off with the easy part, and by easy, I mean the part that I already know somewhat how to do. I know my first sculpt isn't going to be perfect, but I tried my best. Here goes:

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Aigis's headphones

I already had on hand some Jolly King Modeling clay from the last time I got it into my head that I wanted to sculpt and cast something. That something turned out to be a sculpture of Cortana that years later I have yet to finish, though she is coming along nicely. There was plenty of clay to go around. 

I started out with a sizeable chunk of clay. Jolly King is incredibly thick, and hard to work with, so in order to flatten the clay down into a disk like shape I took a hammer to it. I enjoyed a good five minutes of childishly, and mercilessly unleashing hell on a lump of clay. I conceded shortly before I was sure the clay was ready to surrender.

I formed the now flattened clay into a vaguely disk-like shape. From there I began to fold the edges down underneath the disk to give the edges a slight curve.  I made sure to reinforce it with more clay around the inside of the lip I'd created. My earphone was now very frisbee-like. 

 I took great care to solidify the shape and smoothness of the disk.

Smoothing the surface 

Pinching the edges until the disk is
the same width all around

Here the relatively round and smooth finished product. From here I am able to start some of the detail work. It's not perfect, but when doing it by hand in the manner I have been I didn't expect it to be. 

I actually have a fairly nice collection of detail sculpting tools that I enjoy using. they're especially great for small cracks and crevices that need smoothing. They aren't necessary for something like this, but they certainly help. I've been known to utilize the strangest household items to get the effect I want. You can pretty much use anything to aid in sculpting. 

For instance. I needed something round to use as a guide for the detail work. A brief glance around the room revealed to be the option of using the cap of my Black Moor Golfish's pellet food. 

Sorry Morris

 It was close enough to the right size to use to make an indent in the clay. 

From there I was able to trace around the circle to establish the shape and size that I wanted. You can see below how I traced around the indent on either side of it to create the effect I wanted. 

Now it was time to really dig in. No, I mean it. I had to dig out a portion of the clay disk to begin the detail work. 

I allowed myself to keep the indent fairly rough throughout the process of creating it. Once I was finished I spent some time evening everything back out again.

Once I was satisfied with how even the disk was I proceeded to even further detail work. I began adding the holes. I mapped them out first with a very slight prick from a sculpting tool so that I could easily fix any mistakes in alignment.

Once I was satisfied I used the same tool in a drill-like motion to work a large hole into the place of each slight indent. 

Now I was ready for the final element of the detail work. I rolled a small amount of clay into a ball, and again using Morris's pellet food lid, I flattened the mass into a tiny disk. I place this disk in the center of the sculpture. 

I smoothed out the are around it, and moved on to the connecting pieces. You may need to re-poke the holes while cementing the small disk onto the sculpture. I cut three strips of clay off of the block, and cut them in a tapered shape equal to each other. 

I then fitted each piece to the sculpture and smoothed them into place. 

Once the pieces were adequately attached, I took one final step and added more dimension to the sides of the piece. I cut strips of clay, and fashioned them into a crown for the bottom of the sculpture, where I then attached them to create the final product. 

Here's the finished sculpt from a couple angles, as well as a comparison of size in proportion to my face.