RWBY Cosplay part 2

So that you know what I'm talking about, here's a picture of Jaune Arke from RWBY (he's the one on the right).

 Awkward: it's going to be depressingly easy for me to get in character.

 

This task is a lot biigger than I thought   D:   

Someone once told me: “how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time”.

I discovered that doing this:

1.       Make Jaune Arke’s armour

2.       Job done. time for cake

Does not work. So I broke it down into steps:  

1.       Gather required materials

2.       Foam armour

2.1 Pattern pieces for: chest plate, back plate, joiners, shoulders and gloves.

2.2 cut them out in foam

2.3 heat gun them to shape

2.4 paint with PVA glue (3-4 layers), coat with plasti-dip, and paint with spray paint. (fine detail can be added with a permanent marker).

2.5 cut the vinyl into strips

3.       Cloth bracers – hem tape required (because screw sewing that by hand)

-          Not sure if or how pattern pieces are required here.

4.       Cut gloves to size

4.1 finger holes,

4.2 hot glue on the ‘metal’ plates

4.3 hot glue on the armour plate

5.       Belts

5.1 cut vinyl to size & glue together

5.2 attach eyelet holes

5.3 attach buckles

5.4 new belt  

5.5 for extra bonus points, make the leather pouches from the spare vinyl

6.       Cut sleeves off shirt and hem them (careful about size, I want to get this perfect on my first try)

7.       Wait for wig to arrive in the mail

8.       Try it on, take photos and congratulate myself for being one damn fine looking otaku : D

 

Yay! The task itself has remained the same but is somehow easier now that I know what I need to do. Sort of. Its my first costume that I’m making myself and I know that I don't have the experience or skills to get things perfect, so I shall have to go easy on myself when/if I don't get things one hundred percent on the first try. This won’t be easy. Maybe my standards are too high. Homer Simpson once said this:

“You tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is, never try.”

Which is strangely encouraging in a subverted sort of way. There is so much that’s wrong with that statement. If you never try, there’d be no point to doing anything and you may as well be dead. You just need to keep trying different ways until something works and then you get better at it and it builds character. That’s why hard times are called “trying times”.   Yay wisdom!

 

Someone once told me that art is about "not telling yourself you suck, and just going for it". so here I go, one Jaune Ark costume coming up.

I don't know how to do some of the finer steps such as sewing hems on things. If anyone knows of easy ways to put hems on stuff (I don’t have access to a sewing machine) please let me know in the comment area below ↓

Also on a different topic, I’d like to get good at drawing pictures/landscapes/scenery. the plan is to eventually draw something good enough for the background to this blog. I may play around with sketching first but I would like a better program than MS Paint to edit things on PC when I scan them in or maybe to even draw straight in to the program itself (I’d like to draw like what you see in anime, but not sure how they make the pictures the way they do). If anyone knows of any good freeware programs that will help I’d appreciate it if you let me know.

 

For now I'm going to get as much done as possible because Animania is only three weeks away. For the next few weeks I will have to put my hectic social life on hold if I want to get this costume done in time. If you don't see me please don't worry I'm not becoming a recluse and I still care about you all, I'm just working on this project.  

Love you all and until next time,

This is James signing off.

Costume Stuff

Costume Stuff 

SPOTLIGHT:  I swear it's bigger on the inside

If you’ve been to Spotlight before you know it’s not your average type of shop. The. Place. Is. Massive. and full of every different type of cloth known under the sun (among other things). To give you an idea on size, Spotlight is like the Bunnings Warehouse of all things involving thread. Walking through the doors and being confronted by rows upon rows of hundreds of various sorts of special fabrics and who knows what else, I realised how little I actually know about what to look for. As someone who doesn’t know the difference between any sort of fabric, this was fairly intimidating.

I’d been there with a friend once last year. The place was *exactly* as daunting as I remembered

One of the ladies that works there was able to help me out with selecting some fabric. There was also the issue of being able to sew the cloth together later on. I dont own a sewing machine. I found the answer in the next isle.

Holding up the tube of glue I asked:

“Hey, I’m too lazy to sew stuff together, will it work just as well if I just use glue instead?”

“absolutely” answered the assistant. By the surprised look on her face, maybe no-one had asked about using glue instead of sewing stuff together before. Maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t. I dont know much about how costume making works, but I'm going to trust in the professional advice given to me by the department store clerk on using glue being okay. Time to find out.

Sometime last year, a friend of mine and I made plans to make Spartan armour like the Master Chief uses in the Xbox game Halo. Construction started this year and she finished her's several months ago. This has involved a lot of time and effort so far and I’m nowhere near finishing (hopefuly by November).
 

Papercraft helmet. It's a legitimate strategy.

I’ll be making the armour out of foam, hot glue, PVA glue, paint, plasti dip ("it’s really cool stuff": http://www.plastidip.net.au/), blood, sweat and tears. And I’m starting from zero experience level. Fun fun fun.

On a side note, I accidentally cut my thumb with my stanley knife while cutting foam to size. To put a short story shorter, superglue is magical stuff for holding you together.   : )  

Anyways: cosplay. Armour that will look *awesome* but not skilful enough to make it yet, which brings me to a side-project:

Jaune Ark cosplay (much simpler armour. A good starting point)

For those of you that know about RoosterTeeth.com and Red vs Blue, congrats for being a person of refined taste and quality. You'll probably know  that Roosterteeth (henceforth referred to as RT) recently started branching out into making an animated series called Red White Black Yellow or RWBY (pronounced ‘Ruby’).  For those who have no idea what I’m talking about, I recommend checking out their most recent series here: http://roosterteeth.com/archive/?id=7872. Their work has improved greatly over the last ten years and its nice to see them branching out into other forms of animation. I have highly enjoyed the RWBY series so far.

Rooster teeth. check them out. really cool stuff.

Note: pictures will be added for this post later.
*UPDATED* pictures added.

 

Preface

G'day,

 

Many people have told me "you should write a book", "I hope you keep a journal" or "Have you thought about working in comedy" and one person even said (directed at someone else) "I want you to follow Jim around and write down everything he says, put it in a book and get back to me, it'll be full of laughs". Until now I've been content with keeping a journal and updating my Facebook wall now and then.

 

Well, I've heard your pleas and at long last, here are the much anticipated  writings of someone who sees the world just that little bit differently.

 

This blog won't be all entertaining. Some parts will be informative, other parts will be about thing's I've learned, or about adventures I've been on and I'll try not to boor you by including too much angst.  I'll know what else I'll include in this blog after I've written it.

 

For now, I'm going off on adventures so that I've got something for you to read about in post number 1.

 

enjoy   ( :