the calibur of your soul - natsu (SPANDEX)

Tried to break up the process of this cosplay into semi-organized "sections" per post, because I was a little all over the place in working on this cosplay, didn't have enough materials, time constraints, got distracted by Mass Effect 3... I already did the write-up on Natsu's default swords, the link is here.

I decided to include all the details related to sewing the spandex pieces in this post, which consists of the bodysuit and tabi socks.

Here's the character illustration showing a red bodysuit--the in-game rendering is of a dark salmon bodysuit w/ an iridescent finish. Wanted to go w/ the in-game bodysuit but could not find this fabric ANYWHERE. Luckily I found a great spandex fabric with a nice sheen, which was a painful $24/yard. I bought a yard and a half, which was exactly enough for the bodysuit and the socks, and just enough to cut an extra pair of socks since I have never made tabi socks before!


^ How I brainstorm

I wanted this to be a one-piece bodysuit, meaning there is only a zipper at the back and no side seams! Luckily it fit after the first fitting, so as long as I don't eat any burgers or buffets for a while, ha.



The spandex I bought is fairly thick--it was called "Super Spandex". But obviously I still had to buy a special bra so as to avoid awkward bra lines. Yes, these pictures above look WEIRD but once on the body the fit is perfect (I'll post a picture later with some of the armor on). And below is the pattern. I first drafted a 2-piece full-length bodysuit, then modified the 2 pieces into ONE piece. It was surprisingly easy and I can make a video about it/write a step-by-step process when this cosplay has been completed.

^ The pattern for the bodysuit.

I didn't finish the edges because they didn't unravel and for the fingerless sleeves there was no way I could fit that through my machine...


I had to create a two-piece sleeve, which was kind of a pain, because usually sleeves are one piece, and the only time you really need a two-piece sleeve is for creating a tailored jacket/blazer. BUT, Natsu's sleeves don't stop at the wrist, and the easiest way for me to create the fingerless glove look was to have another piece sewn to the "top piece" of the sleeve, which starts from the sleeve cap/armhole seam.

Even with the tabi socks I didn't want the seam going down the center front of my leg because it would bother me for the rest of my life if this didn't look as close as possible to the game rendering/illustration/concept art. I found a tabi sock tutorial (though it's in Japanese, I'll write my version soon), cut one sample, sewed it up, and after test-fitting on my leg, I drew a line for where I wanted to shift the seam. I had to keep the seam separating the toes otherwise I wouldn't be able to control the fit on the top of my foot. I went with a curved seam so I could "hide" the seam to the side, as you can see in the pictures. I basically changed what was a 3-piece pattern into a 2-piece pattern, which, actually, results in less sewing for me! I was very pleased w/ the fit after I shifted the seam. Also very comfortable.



To create the closure for the bodysuit, I bought a regular (not invisible) red zipper. I was okay with the zipper being slightly exposed because my fabric is fairly thick, and wrangling an invisible zipper while keeping my one and only seam neat was not worth it to me. I don't like taking out the seams and restitching on knit fabrics, even if you're using a ballpoint needle you are basically destroying the fabric :( I'd rather focus on stitching all my seams correctly the first time. Because you all know how much we cosplayers love ripping out seams at 3am!


I was lucky to find a mesh fabric that had the exact look I was going for--and which I thought would be pretty accurate to the concept art. My other option was to layer 2 fabrics together but this saved me some time and headache. The neck piece is only sewn to the rest of the bodysuit at the shoulder seam and center back, because I didn't want any topstitching around the actual neckline. I added a knit binding along the top edge of the neck piece mesh to finish.

I said I was going to include all the costs in this cosplay, so here's a quick rundown--
Spandex fabric = $24/yard, 1.5 yards purchased = $36
Mesh fabric = $11/yard, 1/4 yard purchased =  $2.75
Zipper = $2.00
Black knit fabric for binding = leftover from previous cosplays

Just to make the bodysuit cost me $40.75 (materials only).

Bleach Mashiro Kuna Cosplay Costume

Afriend of mine asks me that which character would be suitable for a cosplaygirl doesn’t want to show much skin, the less the better. And the first onecomes to my mind is Celty Sturluson from Durarara, "The Black Biker" or “The Headless Rider". But, now, bleach Mashiro Kuna is also a good choice, how could i forget her! 

Mashirohas an appearance of a young girl with Hazel eyes. She wears a white bodysuitwith orange gloves, boots and scarf, along with a set of goggles atop her limegreen hair in human world. When staying in Soul Society, she wore a standardShinigami robes with very long sleeves, plus pink scarf and glasses over herwavy lime green hair.

This bleach Mashiro cosplay costume looks the same as the one she wear in human world.If you are love this type of clothing or want to display curved shape, or don’twant to expose your skin because of different reasons, this one would be anideal choice.

Mass Effect 3 - Kai Leng (mask)

I had some leftover Wonderflex after I cut out the armor for my Natsu cosplay, and since Wonderflex is between $30-$50 per sheet, I was not going to let any of this go to waste. I'm still drifting through my post-ME3 depression here, so I decided to make Kai Leng's eye mask. If you played the game you probably hate his guts but his facial gear looks pretty cool. I love the design and I thought it'd be a good opportunity to experiment with making masks!


This took me about 4 hours on and off because I got distracted by the ME3 multiplayer for an hour, hah. I also had to factor in time to let the glue and the paint dry.

FIRSTLY, I APOLOGIZE THAT ALL THESE PHOTOS ARE IPHONE PHOTOS. Half of them are Instagram'd but I forgot to charge the battery for my DSLR and wanted to work on this mask, randomly, my next post will have fancy DSLR photos again.

I drew a pattern on Illustrator with some measurements I made according to my face. I taped these patterns after I cut them out, onto my leftover sheet of Wonderflex. 

I knew I would be making the mask in layers, so I molded the "base" piece (which is what I considered the "black" piece to be) to my face. Using the heat gun I softened the Wonderflex and gently pressed the piece against the contours of my face. That's probably not the best thing to do but well, it worked for me. After that I just softened each layer and molded layer upon layer (painting the layer beneath it first, of course).

I painted a thin layer of gesso the base, but it might not have been a thick enough layer as Wonderflex naturally doesn't have a perfect, smooth surface--you can see the slightly textured surface of the Wonderflex despite the black paint.

Each layer is reinforced with tacky glue. As you can see I have some really fancy clamping tools.

I only used 3 colors of paint, starting with black as the base for each layer. Then I brushed a metallic gunmetal paint or a silver acrylic paint over the black to give the illusion of these pieces actually being some kind of metal. I find that metallic acrylic paints are always too transparent, and that painting a black base first will give more opacity to the metallic acrylic paint.

This concludes my explanation of how I made his eye mask ONLY. Doesn't include his entire face piece. I will eventually make that but it is heaps more complicated than just molding Wonderflex to MY FACE.

Bleach Isshin Kurosaki Cosplay

What do you think of this bleach Isshin cosplay? In my point view, this cosplayer is excellent and incomparable. Um, it looks as if Ichigo’s father is looking as me but not a cosplay. And I just wonder why he is so look-alike as Isshin. It is perfect job.

 
 As the farther of bleach Ichigo, Isshin Kurosaki runs a private clinic in human world and is a tall muscular man with spiky black hair and brown eyes, plus there is thin facial hair around his mouth and on his cheeks. Isshin generally looks like a wacky and high-spirited father in his family. As a matter of fact, he is a Shinigami and would be more serious then.

Do you want to show you talent to display a fantastic bleach cosplay, the same this guy or better one or something else? Take action to cosplay your favorite bleach character or others as long as you want to, you would never know what it would be till you try it.

Bleach Tercera Espada Nel Cosplay Costume

As one of the members of bleach Espada, Nelliel Tu Odelschwanck, known as Nel, is one the popular cosplay choices for girls. This is one of the cosplay costumes for portraying Nel, which is in the form of white shirt, matching pants and black belt, somewhat sexy and special cosplay dress.

Cosplay bleach Nel by means of dressing this suit would make us feel the same as her in this series. As a matter of fact, apart from the other female bleach characters, Nel is also a hot and adorable girl. What is more, the kawaii skull on her head and the curl lake blue hair, which makes her more beautiful and appeal.

Bleach Rukia Kuchiki Cosplay

Umm, I have to admit that this bleach Rukia cosplay looks really the same as the character Rukia Kuchiki. This girl has Rukia’s face, right? She has a pair of big eyes, what is more, it looks like that she does not wear a wig, and instead, it is her real hair, which makes her more vivid and natural. I love her cosplay.

More often than not, we have to wear the wig of our favorite character because that we have different hair color or hairdo, and most of the time, we cannot style it naturally or make it satisfies our eyes. In this way, it would be much better if we cosplay the look-alike character and also our favorite character at the same time.

On my part, cosplay bleach Rukia is not so easy as we thought. Generally, what's reached in the end may be worse than what was proposed. So we should think it over and make good preparation before we go about the cosplay if we really want to get a noticeable result.

the calibur of your soul - natsu (swords)

I'm not entirely sure how I'm going to finish the rest of this cosplay in a week, especially since I started playing Mass Effect 3, and that's been my life for the past 2 days.... but in any case, I did finish Natsu's swords Kuzukiri and Awayuki. My dad helped me with the sanding as there were a lot of fine sanding details and I'm not that great w/ a belt sander (yet).

I couldn't find great pictures of the swords but that gave me some freedom to play around with some of the details.

Since I am a lot shorter than Natsu, I scaled the swords down so I could translate the cosplay to my body type.

I knew I needed something relatively light and easy to work with so I used MDF for the scabbards. The handle of the swords are also MDF. The blade is actually made of poplar because poplar is much easier to sand than oak or plywood; at the same time, it is rigid, I don't want a floppy blade haha. I drew the swords on Illustrator first, just to get my ideas finalized. I decided that I wanted the scabbards to have beveled edges, and the handle to be an elliptical shape. I guess if you look at the in-game screenshots the scabbards have beveled edges? There was a lot of math involved while creating the scabbards and the blades in order to have the blades fit snugly.





A shitload of sanding.


Hours of sanding later...

After the bases were created, I began painting the scabbards and the swords. I used Montana Gold for the red--I actually used up half a can!! Fumes everywhere...





Instagram photo lol.

For the handle, I wanted to do something a little different and give it a stone-textured finish. I bought a stone-textured finish spray from Home Depot and applied that over the primer. It takes 24 hours to fully dry, but the effect looks really cool! I sprayed the red paint over this to finalize the look.

I had already decided ahead of time that I would be sculpting the details on the scabbard with clay, and creating the details on the handle with Wonderflex. I didn't feel it was important for the details to look perfect on both swords; I wanted these swords to differ slightly in the details. I used lightweight stone clay--dries faster and easy to sand. I kept the sanding to a minimum because I knew I wanted to apply a brushed gold finish afterwards. The best way to create this brushed gold look is probably to apply black paint to the surface you're working on, then use a dry brush to apply the gold paint on top of the black base. If you have too much gold paint on an area you can quickly wipe it off with a damp towel or brush. I used acrylic jewels for the accents. For the less "organic shapes" on the scabbard I used Wonderflex for structure and stability. Then came more clay for the twisty-vine details. For the twisty-vine details on the scabbards, I used black puffy fabric paint. All of these were given the "brushed gold" treatment as well.









For the sword handles, I used Wonderflex for all the details since it would be easier than sculpting, and especially since these pieces were very thin to begin with it would be easier to add layers of Wonderflex rather than to roll out a ridiculously thin piece of clay, only to have it break later.









I used more black puffy fabric paint for the raised details on the swords. Then gave them the "gold treatment".

These probably don't look like they took FOREVER, but the fabric paint took at least 20 hours to fully dry, and I had to lay the scabbards completely flat while I applied the paint otherwise it would drip. So I could only paint one surface at a time! Stone clay also dries fairly quickly but I still had to wait at least 4-5 hours in order to start applying paint. Lots of time spent waiting for things to dry!!




4/1 edit --I mentioned on Twitter that I was going to break down the cost of this cosplay, and I realized I didn't write that here. I am only including things I had to buy specifically for this cosplay, not leftover materials:

2 strips of poplar = $2/ea, $4 total
2 3/8" pieces of MDF = $2/ea, $4 total
1 can of stone finish spray = $9
1 bottle of puffy fabric paint = $4
1 sheet of 21" x 27" Wonderflex = $33 (after shipping)
1 can of red paint (leftover)
1 can of metallic silver paint = $6
1 lb of lightweight stone clay (leftover)
2 bags of acrylic jewels = $3/ea, $6 total
1 tube of gold acrylic paint (leftover)
1 tube of black acrylic paint (leftover)
TOTAL = $62