Author: RampagingCoconut

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Queen of Blades update: August 2

Last week was insanely busy for me, between being home a day late from a trip to visit some friends due to airline issues, guests coming over, going to a book signing for George R. R. Martin, and a birthday party, so I didn’t get as much done as I had hoped. We’re still doing pretty darn good though in progress land.

Both foot molds are done… but neither of them are opened. Fingers crossed that these babies decide to open for us, apparently stone molds can be a pain. We’ll be hopefully opening them tonight.

We started finally working on the wings. This is a fiberglass back plate that will be going on my back under a corset. The corset will help support the wings and put all the weight onto my hips, in theory.

This is just one of the plates that are going to be attached to the fiberglass back plate. Mario worked on bending it with a map gas torch, and we should be attaching them this week.

We drew this a long time ago, but this is the scale we’re planning on for the wings. We want me to be able to move around with them, without them being too large to get up the stairs or down the ramp for the costume contest, or being too small to where they don’t make as much of an impact.

This is what the gloves looked like when I started working on them a few days ago. They’ll be finished today, and molded in fiberglass tomorrow.

Weird angle so they don’t look quite right, but here is one glove almost finished.

That’s it for the progress post for today, next week I hope to have a lot more progress done for you to read about!

 

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Guest post: How to make Devil May Cry Dante’s Rebellion Sword

(Today’s tutorial is a guest post from Kevin of Miccostumes.com!)

Dante’s Rebellion sword is sought after by many cosplay fans. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how I made my own Rebellion sword. With this tutorial, you will be able to make it personally.

 Required materials: carbon fiber tube, airplane board, plastic board, pearl board, water putty, acryl pigment, paint spraying outfit including drawing utensil, utility knife (a small one and a big one), white latex, hot melt glue, AB glue (being transparent, it can harden in 4 minutes), abrasive paper (No. 100 to 400 should be all prepared) and watercolor utensil.  Continue reading →

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Queen of Blades update: July 12

 

This weekend, Mario and I attached some steel rods for support so the fiberglass mold won’t warp (we’re likely adding on more later on) and unmolded Kerrigan. We started by first drilling holes around the mold for bolts to go in to, then inserted the bolts and secured them with wing nuts. Then Mario used a vibratory saw to clean up the edges so the edge of the mold would be cleaner, and finally we found a seam and started to gently pry open the mold by inserting a screwdriver, and then inserting popsicle sticks all the way around.

She was fiberglassed on to the board so we had to cut her off. The mold wasn’t damaged at all from this.

More on how we fully got the mold apart later, but here are some more pictures!

I was going to do a weekly Kerrigan update, but then I realized that we’re so busy, some weeks go by that we only get a tiny bit of progress done, barely anything that’s worth mentioning on the blog, so I’ll update whenever I have more than one thing to show you guys.
Happy crafting!

 

 

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In case you were wondering… my (Alice’s) Blizzcon costume!

That’s right, people, I am going to be attending Blizzcon 2011 as Kerrigan, Queen of Blades! The costume is based on most of her more recent pictures; the wings will be similar in shape to the picture below, and thanks to Steve Wang uploading a ton of pictures of the making of the statue of her he did for Blizzard, I have an entire binder full of reference photos!

I’ll be putting up a guide on how we’re making this, for sure, but not until after the costume is completely finished- I want to make sure the whole thing is complete before I start writing up tutorials for it.

This is the current state of her! I was going to wait until both sides were fiberglassed and apart, but darn it, I’m too excited, and I wanted to announce it while everyone was still awake, since we’re not going to be done with glassing until late tonight!

Some sculpture pictures!

In case people are wondering, we’re planning on doing this as a full body suit, cast in foam latex. We’ve been planning this since January and working on it since February. At this time, we’ve put 180 hours into it, and plan on working on it a whole lot more.

I’m so excited for Blizzcon this year! I can’t wait to see everyone there!

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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’.

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We’re around, just busy!

We’ve been meaning to throw some posts up on here for quite a while now, Mario has a series he wants to do on his Witch Doctor, plus one for how to size your weapon in Paint and transfer the image onto foam or wood. We had a guest in for the last two weeks, though, so we had no time to post anything on the blog.

We also have two weapon tutorials coming up, one for the Golden Staff of the Sin’dorei, and one for a set of Gladiator’s Shankers.

Mario is working hard to get the staff finished as we speak, since we are heading down to Southern California to drop it off at the end of this week, and then it’s full speed ahead on the daggers, and our Blizzcon costumes, of course.

Right now we are completely full on commissions until September, at the soonest; we have a few commissions that we might take on if we have the time, but they’re in our waiting list (they chose to wait, we didn’t make them!) so we do hope that we can do their costume and weapon as well!

What are you working on right now? Are you going to cosplay at Blizzcon? We hope to see you there!

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Otaku House Cosplay contest!

I wanted to go ahead and put up a quick post linking our friends who are also entered into the Otaku House cosplay contest on Facebook. In order to vote for them, you’ll need to ‘like’ Otaku House, then ‘like’ their photos, and you can vote for as many as you like. If I left anyone out, or if you’d like me to link you as well, please let me know! Click on their names to go to the picture on Facebook!

Lorraine Torres, Mistress of Pain  Continue reading →