Month: June 2011

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Sizing your Cosplay props

Achieving that perfect look for props can be very tough. But even if all the details are in place, should the item be too small it will still look wrong.

Proper prop size is key to any successful cosplay. From a set of swords, Keyblades, armor, or outlandish props like full wings or even oversize vegetables and signs.

I start with a good reference photo of the image. In this case I am working on set of World of Warcraft daggers for a commission. This technique will work for any costume or prop assuming the character in question is vaguely human in size and proportions.

I did basic human anatomy and used the waist as a half way in total height. The weapons are for a female cosplayer but WoW has some gender issue and sizes the weapons very strangely depending on who holds them. I feel that the male human is as close to “real life” as you can get, so that’s the template I use.

Here is the same process repeated for a very well known character
Link from the “Legend of Zelda” seriesAfter I got done with this sizing chart, I decided to reference the real items that are for sale and I found that I was within an inch on both the sword and shield.

Hylian Shield
Master Sword

I hope this helps all you cosplayers out there. A little research and time spent pouring over reference pictures will go along way in creating that perfect cosplay.

Good Crafting
Mario “Ryithos”

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How to: make American McGee’s Alice 2 Dress

In celebration of American McGee’s Alice 2: Madness Returns coming out today (June 14th!), I decided to see if I could make Alice’s classic dress and apron, and learn to sew in the process. Yes, that’s right, I’ve never sewn an entire costume from start to finish. Most of the fully sewn costumes that I’ve done, I’ve had help from Mario or his mother. So, I decided that I’m going to learn to sew so that I don’t have to ask for help in that department anymore, and I did some research and bought my materials.

(Make sure to check out part two, here!)

Continue reading →

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How to: make the Golden Staff of the Sin’dorei

A good friend of mine and Alice’s had asked us to make a staff to go along with her awesome Blood Elf costume. She felt that we could help her with this and the following is a pretty quick tutorial on a pretty simple cosplay prop.


Golden Staff of the Sin’Dorei was the requested prop. I was a little heasitaint at first because she asked to make the gems glow!  Overall the design is pretty simple and I was in luck becouse I had just picked up a new scroll saw at a garage sale for $50 bucks!!! Continue reading →

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Why I haven’t announced my Blizzcon costume yet

It seems there are more and more people each year who keep quiet about their cosplay costumes for Blizzcon and other conventions. I never did before; I was never shy to let people know what I was doing as far as costumes go. However, you may have noticed that this year, I haven’t said a word about what I’m doing for my Blizzcon costume.

Some people don’t announce their costume because they don’t want it to get ‘stolen’. Well, honestly, unless that costume is something of your own creation, I don’t see the reasoning in that. If it’s a tier set or a plain old NPC in game, even a boss, if people have seen it, they’ve thought about cosplaying it. I have no problems with people cosplaying the same thing as me. Why?

I’m confident in my abilities as a cosplayer. Mario and I strive to make everything we do as accurate as possible, we take our time, we do months of research on new techniques. I wouldn’t have cared if there were six other Witch Doctors last year at Blizzcon (there weren’t, but it was a crazy costume to attempt anyway), because none of them would have looked exactly like mine. People would have done the mask differently, the hair differently, everything would have their style, their techniques.

You can try to ‘claim’ a costume- I’ve seen it happen a few times over the years- but that gets you nothing but rage when someone still cosplays the same thing. There’s no reason to think that everyone in the cosplay community knows who you are, or that people will even care enough to not cosplay whatever it is you’re doing. It’s better to just be confident in what you’re doing, be confident that everyone has different styles and ways of making costumes.

I haven’t announced what I’m doing yet because we’re working with a ton of new techniques. None of the techniques we’re using for this costume is anything we’ve ever done before, and there is still a lot that could go wrong.

Granted, our new motto is ‘if it’s not broken into a million pieces or on fire, it can still be finished’, but there’s one step in our costume making that, if we screw it up, we’re back to square… two. Not all the way back at the beginning, but we’ll have lost lots of work, and honestly, at that point, I’m not sure if it can be saved.

So. Instead of saying ‘when we get so many likes on our Facebook page, we’ll announce what I’m doing’, I’m saying ‘when I get to that point in my costume that I know we can pull it off, I’ll announce what I’m doing’.