Katsucon Pics!

A comparison of my not-quite-finished cosplay with the official artwork!  (Note that my eyes are blue to match the game model.)

My friends as Xianghau and Sophitia from Soul Calibur 4 were with me! :D

VICTORY!!!

 Haters gonna hate

And here's me finishing the costume at the Katsucon hotel!

I made the eyes out of Christmas tree ornaments that I cut in half and cut holes for the pupils.  Then I sprayed them with primer, and after the primer dried, painted the irises with acrylic paint.  That was all the vision I had! :O  The beak was made of craft foam and the eyebrows are black faux fur.  Everything on the head is held together with lots and lots of hot glue.

I had fun making my costume, but it was really hard!  D: I got through it with my friends cheering me along all the way, so that I did not give up.  Maybe someday I will make another costume, lol.  I did learn a lot about sewing with help from my friends, and making armor and fursuits with help from the internets! :D  

Foaming the Head

I wanted the head to be a nice, big, round owl head shape.  OvO  So I wrapped the mattress pad foam around the plastic canvas, and kept cutting and gluing until I had a nicely-shaped lump.  I didn't worry too much about it being smooth, since the fur covering it would make it look smoother.

The next blog photos will be the ones taken during or after Katsucon!

Starting the Feet

Olcadan has big yellow bird feet with two toes in the front and one behind, all with long, black claws.  :O  I made the feet using craft foam and old shoes, but they didn't hold up well at Katsucon, and I think I'm going to scrap the craft foam and find a better way to make them for the next con.

I decided to use my old Asics running shoes that I was going to throw away because they had holes in the top, and were getting pretty ugly since I spray-painted them green and the spray-paint was wearing off, lol. The soles were still decently comfortable though, which was why I was hesitant to throw them out.  I'm glad I didn't, my feet were very comfortable at Katsucon!

The first thing I did was take the laces out and cut off the end of the tongue of my shoes so that the tongues lined up with the hole where your foot goes into the shoe.  Then I hot-glued the tongue like that so the shoes would be loose enough that I could slip them on.  I hot-glued craft foam into the shape of a tube, then hot-glued the tube onto the top of my shoes.  The craft foam was still pretty wimpy, so I put Mod Podge on the tubes to stiffen them up.  Here they are with a fresh coat of Mod Podge drying on them:

After this, I cut mattress pad foam (very similar to upholstery foam, but with one flat side and one egg carton side) to be the shape of toes and hot-glued them onto the shoes.  Then I hot-glued craft foam on the outside to create a smooth silhouette.  I ran out of yellow craft foam, so I used white and green, and they had to be painted yellow to match later.  I cut out claws from black craft foam and glued them on (I really like their silhouette, although SOME PEOPLE think they're too long).  All the craft foam was Mod Podged.  The next picture is from after Katsucon:

They were tricky to walk in.  As you can see, the foam got beat up, dented, and cracked in some places.  The claws fell off at times and had to be glued back on.  :P

Some References Used

I knew the belt buckle in the game and official art were different (I was going for the game look, note the blue eyes at the end), and I wanted an idea of depth, so I looked at the game model for references.  Here are some of my reference pictures (photos of my TV, lol!):

And a CG reference from the game compared to the official character illustration:

Armor Progress

Here are my armor pieces in different stages of completeness.  The loincloth and owl-head belt buckle have a flat coat of paint, but have not been antiqued yet.  The tassets and cuffs have been antiqued and sprayed with shiny lacquer to seal them.  A ruler that just happened to be there gives a size estimate:

I made the owl-head belt buckle out of an entire 8-oz. pack of Paper Clay.  It dried feeling extremely light.  It took a few days to dry completely.  I filled in some cracks on the back and the inside of the beak (from the bottom) with hot glue to improve its structural integrity.  I was regretful to have to antique the owl-head belt buckle because it was so beautiful when I painted it with flat metallic gold acrylic paint:

Unfortunately, you couldn't see what it was from the side:

This is how the owl-head belt buckle appeared after antiquing:

To create an "antique" effect on my armor, I mixed black and blue paint together to create a shadow color, rubbed it on my armor, and wiped it away, but left it in the crevasses.  (Sometimes I had to go back in with a paint brush to get the effect right, especially on the stripes on the owl-head belt buckle.)  I also painted on faux "shadows" because I knew you would not be able to see any real shadows in flash-photography.  You can especially see this on my loincloth, where the point in the middle "casts a shadow" on the swirly pieces under it.  On the owl-head belt buckle, the dark areas are also shadows and recesses, for instance the nostrils.  (My friend said that the beak looked all lumpy with thumb-prints all over it before I painted it, but I think it was because she didn't know it had nostrils until I finished the antiquing process, and maybe she thought the nostrils were weird dents.  I don't think the beak looks lumpy...)

Here you can see the antiqued owl-head belt buckle, barn owl-head knee armor, and loincloth.  They have all been sprayed with shiny lacquer to seal them.  The barn owl-head knee armor was made from another 8-oz. pack of Paper Clay with some to spare.  They took a few days to dry, and I painted them with silver and copper metallic acrylic paint, and antiqued them with the same black and blue mixture of acrylic paint.  Note the faux "shadows":

More to come!

After Katsucon!

So, Katsucon has come and gone!  I attended Katsucon February 18-20, 2011, travelling with 3 friends of mine and meeting others there.  I had a great time! :D  I got my Olcadan cosplay done (barely in time!)  In the hotel room on Friday!  There were also mishaps, like my toe claws falling off, but luckily my friends carried superglue to glue them back on!  I also crushed some of my armor when I tried to get my cell phone out of my pocket (due to incredibly limited vision!), which was under my tasset armor!  Luckily, superglue saved the day again!


More progress pics, then pics from Katsucon will be uploaded to this blog soon!  My cosplay is still not 100% done, and I didn't make a custom weapon (I borrowed foam nunchaku from a friend).  Hopefully I will get more done by Animazement, which is May 27-29 in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Armor Painting Progress

I sealed my cuffs with Mod Podge, then coated them with metallic acrylic craft paint.  The silver paint took many layers to cover the base color.  Here are my cuffs with the final flat layer of paint, before antiquing:

Here are the top pieces of the tassets.  The are made of craft foam, like the cuffs.  Here they have been sealed with Mod Podge but haven't been painted yet:

Here are the bottom pieces of the tassets, also made of craft foam.  Here they have been sealed with Mod Podge and have been painted with a layer of metallic blue paint and a couple layers of silver paint, but the silver still doesn't cover the red color of the craft foam that is underneath:

I got my luxurious 3" pile white faux fur from DistinctiveFabric.com, and it is amazingly soft and lush!  The furry pants are complete, but I don't have any photos right now.  I may shorten them.