Greetings from the Dark Side!
As many of you might know, I absolutely love video games, anime, and manga. This makes me partial to things like going to anime/gaming/comic conventions and to cosplaying. I have cosplayed a few times in the past, but I only started to make my own costumes last year. I attempted to make the
Mercenary Katarina cosplay last year but I never completely finished it. I will definitely be finishing that cosplay for Anime Expo 2014 in July. However, I really wanted to do a new cosplay for Fanime 2014 in San Jose. Fanime is this upcoming weekend (May 23-26) so I am really working my ass off to finish this cosplay! I want to detail my progress for you all to see! So let's get right into this new cosplay!
For starters, I should say that this is a character from the online game League of Legends. This character's name is Miss Fortune. She has several costumes (or skins) and I choose this one called "Road Warrior". She looks totally badass in this skin! There are two concept arts for this skin (shown below). I personally like the first concept art the best and this is the look I will be making. However, the reference photo does not provide too many details so I used the other concept art (the second one below) to fill in the blanks.
Here are the steps I have taken to start off my project:
1. After looking and gathering reference pictures, break down the costume into different parts:
-Hair/wig
-Hat
-Goggles
-Weapons (two guns)
-1 Pauldron
-Tattered Cape
-1 Brown Shirt
-Pants
-Several Belts and belt accesories
-1 bag
-Motorcycle Gloves
-1 Knee Armor
-Boots
-Boot Armor (not sure if I will end up making this one)
Making a list is really helpful to do this because you can check things
off your list and know what materials you need to buy for each part. I noticed that many times you can forget things last minute, so for me making a list is a must!
2. Buying materials!
This part is always fun! Make sure you give yourself plenty of time to find and gather materials. I have been gathering materials for months now because I knew with 100% certainty that I would be making this cosplay for Fanime and Anime Expo.
I bought all materials in various places. I bought my wig on eBay, the brown shirt and brown bag at Target, the fabric for the cape at JoAnn, the worbla for the pauldron online, the paint and misc. materials at Michaels, and so on and so forth. I will get more into detail about this in the posts to come. Anyway, I tried my best to spend as little as possible. I recommend going into thrift stores and looking for materials to use in cosplays. I found my gloves this way as well as some other things for other cosplay costumes I want to make! Thrift stores are fantastic!
3. Get started!
I have been really lately, so it took me a long time to get started on my cosplay. But once you do get started you can just go all out and try to finish it quickly. I usually work on my cosplay and watch Netflix or CrunchyRoll at the same time :D
4. Try it Out
One reason I never was able to finish my Katarina cosplay was because I wore it to a convention and realized it needed a lot of work. I did not try it out before wearing it to a con, so I did not realize that I needed to fix a bunch of things. This experience taught me to always test drive costumes. Once you are all done, wear your full costume around your house and see how it holds up. This way you can catch anything that needs to be fixed!
Alright, guys! I will be posting separate posts for parts of this cosplay so keep an eye out :D I should have all the posts up before going to Fanime! :D
Part 2: Pauldron
Part 3: Guns
Thank you for reading!
