The Road to the House of Ballads

So for the upcoming MCM expo at the end of October which is in 2 days now I decided to do the House of Ballads armour set from the game Kingdom of Amalur: Reckoning the problem is I did something real stupid by leaving it
until the last minute really and I’ve literally only just finished it today (Wednesday). I like it but I wish I had started it a lot earlier and then maybe it would be up to the standard i wanted it up to. But anyway, I thought I would share with you a little of the build up to the finishing and give a little preview at the end 🙂

So the first thing I had to do was find some reference which was really hard. I could only find 2 pictures of this set, one of the female which was only a front on view and the male set which was the back and front views. This was problematic as they didnt show the side views, so onto my ps3 i went and loaded up the game so that I could take lots of pictures of all the different angles. So below is basically what I was hoping to end up with or something close to it lol

The cosplay started life as a pair of curtains that my mum had laying around so I tore out the lining and started to make the base of the robes. For this I used a coat pattern and modded it to be what I needed. I also cut a long strip of the green which later became the second collar. To the base robes I added 2 strips up the front and then came the not so fun part. I had to paint all the details on by hand, first all of the gold went onto the robes which took forever, then I painted all the leafy parts on to the robes. I got a yellowish gold table runner
from the charity shop which I cut up and made into the base collar, which i trimmed with a dark green ribbon and painted yet more gold detail onto.
I used the last of the table runner to make the cape, which i cut to shape and made a shield shape out of the green fabric remains and painted the House of Ballads crest onto it. I trimmed the belt with a little bit of craft foam here and there to make it more like the reference pictures. So below is what I had basically ended up with about half way through my build.

I had never used craft foam before so I wasn’t expecting my cosplay to look all that great lol but I used more craft foam to make the gauntlets which i secured to a fabric wristband so that i could undo and redo them really easy and the craft foam on the boots I just sewed on. Again I wish I had left myself a little bit more time to make it into what i really had in mind, but I do like the end result, its not too bad really. I can always redo the armour bits when I re-wear the cosplay.

So i had finally finished the robes and the armour bits, but I wanted a weapon set to go with it. Now I couldn’t go for this particular hammer I was eyeing up as I would have been thrown out of expo for it lol so I went with my favourite weapon the Chakrams. So I grabbed my Captain America shield and drew around it so I had a nice big circle onto a cardboard box, from that I drew the blade parts on and cut it out and I did this twice. I used paper mache over the cardboard bases to smooth them out and I sprayed them silver. For the handles I wanted to use leather, but the real stuff is expensive so I went to the charity shop and I bought 2 really wide belts. Unfortunately I couldn’t get 2 that were exactly the same colour but I kind of like the different colours in them. I cut the two belts in half and in half again so that I was left with several strips of fake leather, I wrapped them around the handle parts and glued them on with my hot glue gun in the pattern that I needed. Using craft foam I cut out the fancy parts that were on the blades, sprayed them gold and glued them in place and using a green paint I coloured the middles of the craft foam parts.

My character has nice bright red hair and this time I decided to just re dye mine instead of using a wig, and she also has a tattoo on her face, which wasn’t fun to put on as I had to draw it on myself in the mirror so it was all backwards and squiggly but I think the end result is ok. The only thing left to do after all this was team the cosplay with my brown leggings bought especially and it was finally done!! I couldn’t believe it, I didn’t actually believe that I would get it done in time. But even though the end result could have been better I am pretty happy with it and I hope everyone else likes it.

Hope to see all of you at the expo at the excel in a couple of days and I hope you all enjoy it ^_^ ~ Otakugirl

How to make a cosplay accurate: Detailing!

I think this is probably the biggest problem of any cosplayer. How can you tell how big all of those details on your cosplay should be? How can you get them off the reference onto your cosplay?? And how do you even go about getting it accurate???

Today’s examples will be my Epilogue Syaoran, artwork Watanuki, Syaoran Li and Asch cosplays!

Depending on what the detail I’m trying to do is, I go about doing them in one of four ways. I’ll run through them one by one.

 Some detail designs can be really complex and if you’re like me, then I wouldn’t want to risk trying to draw them because it probably wouldn’t look anything like it does in the reference! So what can you do? Well, for my artwork Watanuki cosplay I used my trusty paper pattern! Now, this isn’t any old paper pattern. Because I want it accurate as possible I have directly ripped the design from the reference! You can’t get anymore accurate than the reference itself can you? 🙂 You can use any old image/photo editing software for this: Photoshop, GIMP (it’s free!) or even paint. All you got to do is isolate the part you’re wanting and make it bigger!

What’s that you say? What if I can’t see all of it? Never fear! This is where your image editing software comes in again. With my artwork Watanuki cosplay, for the arm detail you could only see half of it. (Well, you could see a whole one, but it wasn’t symmetrical due to it being a side-ish view) So all I did was take that half, copy/paste it and then flip it. Carefully put the two halves together and you have one whole!

A more unconventional method I do is actually measuring the detail on a reference. I know it sounds crazy, but it’s how I did all of the details on my Epilogue Syaoran cosplay. It’ll only really work though on details that are straight blocks (I think. I’ve never tried it on anything else), so bare that in mind.

I have the Japanese artbook that contains the Epilogue Syaoran artwork, so I assumed this is the actual “proper” size the image should be. One day I was trying to figure out how big to make all of the green parts and thought “What if I got my ruler, measured it and scaled it up?” And so I did! From the part I measured, the cape green parts were about 7mm. I like to keep to whole numbers so I scaled it up to 7cm, made a paper template and had a look to see how it looked. You know what: it looked spot-on! So to keep everything consistent I kept with the same scale. So the green on the collar was 2mm: ended up 2cm, bottom of the top was 5mm: ended up 5cm etc.

Following on from ripping a design/detail straight from the reference and depending on whether you have the right programs for it, you can copy/trace the design on the computer. I’ve only been doing this since I’ve been my on graphic design course because I acquired the right program: Adobe Illustrator. Illustrator is very suited to this task because it is a vector-based program. This means it’s designed for drawing objects and then scaling them without losing any of the quality.

I personally like using this method since I can trace the design directly off a reference and then clean it up, remove any inconsistencies and then most importantly: I can make it perfectly symmetrical (if that’s what it should be!). I’ve used to this draw all of Syaoran Li’s details and for one of my future cosplays – Asch from Tales of the Abyss.

And finally, sometimes, when you can’t do any of these other options. You just gotta do some trial and error! This is where paper templates are your friends! (Yes, I know I like my paper templates, but I really do recommend them!) Never cut a template out of your real fabric if you don’t know if it might not be right. Get it right on paper first!! I have so many paper templates that I’ve now had to organise them in poly-pockets! My latest templates are for my Syaoran Li cosplay. So far I’ve got a big template for the hat (and all the details on it), the collar details and each of the designs I drew on Illustrator. These, as I said above, are trial and error in terms of how big you make them. I cut the hat down in size about 4 or 5 times before I was happy with it and I made 2 collar templates before I got the right one 🙂 So don’t panic if it’s not right the first time.

 And that’s it! I people would like, I could do a step-by-step tutorial on how to rip images directly from a reference. Just let me know!