Cosplay??

Oh yes! Iv been wanting to cosplay for a long time but have always been too afraid of the huge intimidating project that it would become. But at last I decided to just go for it! Of course my head is already spinning from figuring out and planning the four and a half (half because I only plan on doing the top half of one of them for a photoshoot) characters I want to finish this year xD

So I figured I would post some pictures of my progress and some sneak peeks of what I have been working on lately! :)

The fist cosplay I am working on is the Lunar Goddess Diana skin from League of Legends. I am so excited about this one because Diana is one of my favorite campions and her lunar goddess skin is just gorgeous. I went to the fabric district in Downtown LA and with some serious searching and digging was able to find all the fabric I need for it.

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There still isn't much even started at this point, but I have the gems for the headpiece and neck finished! These were made with clear resin, molds, and resin dye.

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Next up is Diana's "sickle" sword, I love its design so much! Being totally new to cosplay and having no experience making anything like this before, everything has gone surprisingly smooth so far. I spent a long time researching materials people use and their process. This sword is going to be as tall as me so I didn't want it to be too heavy, so I chose to try making it out of styrofoam.

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I hadn't even thought about how I was going to cut it out till after I already drew the sword onto the styrofoam, then tried using a knife only to find it was way too difficult and would have taken me a month just to cut it out. My dad came up with a brilliant setup to use a hot wire. First he drilled a hole in an old table and put a metal tube in the hole, then hung a wire he got at the 99cent store above the table and through the hole and attached a sledge hammer to the bottom to hang from the wire and weigh it down. Next he attached a car battery charger to the top and bottom of the wire, when he turned it on the wire was instantly hot and instantly cooled when turned off because of how thin it was. So I used that to cut the sword out of the styrofoam and it worked perfectly and cut so smoothly!

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After cutting the sword out there was the long, tedious, and messy process of sanding and shaping. I was really pleased to see how easily styrofoam sanded, it was a great way to make precise adjustments.

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Here it is after all that sanding! Finally starting to look like it can take some heads off, but it is still just styrofoam at this point so it still needs tons of work. The next step was going to be to coat it in resin and fiberglass, but luckily I tried the resin out on a scrap piece of styrofoam and it ended up melting right into the styrofoam! After some panic and research I read that there is a safe resin for styrofoam but the one I bought could also still work if I coat it in gesso first, then it wont eat at the foam. Luckily I had a full bottle of gesso lying around from when I took a painting class. At the moment I am on coat 4 of gesso on the sword, hopefully all goes well and about a week from now the sword will be coated with fiberglass and resin!