Cosplay Prop - Vanilla's Spoon

I absolutely love the anime series Yumeiro Patissiere. It's about Baking desserts, what's not to love about that? (I'm a total foodie).

So this is Vanilla, the main fairy the helps the student out as she learned.  I made the outfit, wings, and spoon prop. 

I found this foam piping  (super flexable) material in the hardware store.  Honesty I dont know what it's suppose to be used for, but that's the magic of aim lessly wandering and finding wonderful material.

I made the M logo of the spoon with sparkle craft foam and coloring the foam pipping with a black marker.

I created a harder back surface for the spoon handle end using the thicker presentation form boards.

Remember using the Iron for the Chi ears?  Well using that technique again.  I'm ironing this foam to help form it into the spoon base.

Need to hold it in it's shape as it cools

Now for the gold coloUring, via spray paint.

I love using old shower curtains.  It can be bunched up so you can get to areas like the underside.

Attach everything to a wooden dowel for a handle and vola.  Now I just need to know how to fly away.

Kraken Got Your Card?

It's a business card holder. No, really...

Kinda random, right?
I was thinking, for that someday when I have my own artist table I will need an eye-catching place to put my stack of business cards. What's more eye-catching than a couple of purple tentacles?

I had a bit of foam leftover from my [Staff of Infinite Mysteries] and Riven projects. I started by sketching a rough shape on the foam with a pen, then carving the foam with a hot knife. First I carved the shape with a long wire knife, the kind they sell to cut floral arrangement foam. Then I carved the details with a smaller, sharp, angled hot knife.

Then I attacked it with sandpaper.

When working with foam like this, you can cut a very rough shape, then fine-tune the shape with rough sandpaper and finish with a finer sandpaper. This foam is very easy to shape by sanding.

After sanding, I applied a quick coat of white primer.

Painting was an experiment with purple, black and white acryllic paints to get the desired look.

Business cards fit easily in between the grasping tentacles!

Costume Progress: Riven

I haven't had much time to work on this costume over the last week, but I did get a few things done.

I formed the base of the shin guard from Model Magic and foam board.

The bodice/tabard piece is off to a good start.

I paper-mache'd the shin guard with strips of newspaper and Mod Podge to give it a uniform texture, then spray-painted it black. That's how far I got prior to tonight.

I spent about 2 hours working on everything tonight (Wednesday). First I hotglued the spikes to the shin guard (in some pictures - the Chinese art? - she has spikes on the knee, in others I can't see them, but I figured the spikes were cool so I would add them). Then I used this tube of Kwik Seal Plus that I had lying around to make the base of the spikes flow into the knee piece. That way it will look more like the spikes are coming out of the knee guard rather than having a gap.

Hot knife time! Tonight I also cut and primed the sword and pieces for the left shoulder armor.

I got started on the broken sword, drawing it straight onto a scrap of insulation foam and then cutting it out with the hot knife.

I had my laptop handy for reference pictures.

The first step was to cut out the rough shape.

Then I drew lines for the next cuts - diagonal cuts to shape the edges.

Here's what it looks like after the first round of shaping the edges - really rough. Nothing a little sandpaper can't fix though!

Sanded and ready for primer! Yes, I still have some leftover even after all of the furniture I refinished and the [Staff of Infinite Mysteries] I made this year. Remember, I am making this entire costume for a $0.00 budget and just reusing whatever I have!

Next I cut out pieces for the left shoulder pauldron. I just estimated the shape and drew it onto the foam, then cut it out roughly. This undergoes the same process as the sword - draw, cut, shape, sand, prime... and paint later.

Sanding smoothes the edges of the foam a lot. I used a rough grit first, then a finer sandpaper.

After making both pieces I tried them out on my shoulder to test the fit. Good enough, IMO!

Then I had to let the primer dry on everything so I played a round of Summoner's Rift in League of Legends. For some reason I ended up playing Soraka, who I never play, but we won anyway. The other team quickly surrendered.

When the primer was fairly dry, I hotglued the spikes onto the shoulder armor pieces, then added the Kwik Seal Plus around the bases to cover over most of the gap. I think the blocks look better than the spikes, but I could add something more to it later. This needs to dry overnight.

Last of all I slapped on a first layer of paint on the sword blade really quick, just some black and grey with metallic silver mixed in. I will detail it later after it dries overnight.

Tutorial - How to Make a Foam Cutting Table

Why use a foam cutter?  Well let's look at this picture below.  The piece on the left was broken naturally while the piece on the right uses the cutter.  Now do you want your sword to look all bumpy?  That's going to slice up a body really cleanly.

But playing with foam is stil great for cosplay so over the past 4 years I have purchased two foam cutters (between $10 - $25).

So you can start off with a foam cutting knife and slice through your foam with a cutting drawn on.  But many time after i do it, and i flip the piece to the other side, I realized that I had not been holding the knife exactly straight.  So all my sizes on the drawn side is pretty, but but all the work on the backside is all misproportioned.  Looks quite bad.

hard to tell in the photo, but in real life the two sides aren't even . . . .

I used a foam cutting table (like a band saw table but with a hot wire) back in high school.  It was pretty fun to play with, but why would you pay that much for something that would just take up space and you would rarely use?  So let's make our own

I used a small bed side dresser to tape the foam cutter and let it stick up straight past the end of this computer desk.

Be careful you dont hit the knife on the table.  I accidently melted a line on the table molding (my boyfriend wasn't very happy to see that damage on his desk).

So just like using a bandsaw, you start sliding your piece against the knife and push it naturally to let it cut. 

It's also awesome on holes because you slide the piece onto the knife.

Here's my cut piece.  Lines are smooth as much as my hand can glide (if you are more picky you can you a straight edge to act as a guide if that's what your piece calls for). 

Cosplay Week #1 - Melissa Seraphy

In the spirit of dressing up for Halloween I would like to introduce Cosplay Week.  This week we will be blogging about cosplay projects we have worked on.

Old definition of Cosplay:  Dressing up as an anime (japanese cartoons), manga (japanese for comic book), or video character from primarily the Japanese culture
New definition of Cosplay:  Dressing up as any characters or persona

On to the project...

What is Halloween without a the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown?
I fell in love with this toy when I first saw it that I had to cosplay it. I didn't even know what it was originally from



So the hardest thing to do is to create the pumpkin. I will admit this wasn't easy

I got some foam (the egg shell foams for camping are cheaper to purchase than by the yard foam at the fabric store)

cut into it ovals (aka cat eyes)

spray painted with orange paint (this worked suprisingly well)

pinned the pieces together with binder clips (I learned in future projects that using industrial glue works well)

stripped in some fence wire vertically within the binder clips for structual integrity (worked well, but the ones that came lose began to scratch me)

turn the pumpkin into a jack-o-latern by cutting out eyes and mouth

you can see through the eyes and see the wiring and binder clips

Because foam is soft, the top has a small opening for my waste to popout of, and the whole thing was able to rest on my hips.  It was a little heavy, but well worth it for the love of cosplay

So the bottom has a small opening for my legs, because it was small and so low I couldn't walk normally and ended up shuffling around which apparently people find cute. 

Little photo color editing and this is what you get.

-SmallRiniLady