BlizzCon was a BLAST, and I will be hopefully posting about it this week! Sylvanas came out pretty well, but she’s not 100% complete yet. I plan on doing a Sylvanas photoshoot in a couple of weeks, so I’ll post up my cosplay overview then – which will include the processes I went through to complete the project.

I’m already beginning to plan and construct my next few projects!

Gender Swapped Mephisto Pheles is going to be my next “major” project which I will be working on, hopefully to debut at Anime Los Angeles 2012. I have big ideas planned for this project. :)

I also think I have my BlizzCon 2012 costume picked out already – a Blood Elf wearing the t11 priest set! I absolutely love the color scheme, and all the lighting!

The staff in the picture is just a placeholder, as I’m not compeltely sure on which weapon(s) I will be constructing yet. I plan on really pushing this project far though, with many many effects. I might even have to look into Arduino programming.

Other than those two, I have Saber Alter (possibly) planned. I’m still deciding on whether I want to do it yet or not, but if I do decide to work on it I’ll be trying to complete it by Fanime 2012. I also have a “secret” Cosplay which I may or may not be doing. I’ll be posting progress pictures of that on Facebook, so although I won’t be announcing what it is you’ll still be able to guess what it is from progress!

And for smaller “easier” projects, I’m supposed to make Taiga Aisaka for ALA 2012, and Raspberyl from Disgaea for AX 2012. We’ll see if I actually manage to pull through with all these projects!

I’m going to be an extremely busy bee the next year! Aside from all these personal projects, I’m hoping to start doing prop commissions finally for some cosplay supply cash!

If you’re interesting in active updates regarding commissions and/or costume progress, just head on over to my Facebook FanPage (VensyCosplay)! I update there quite frequently, so if you have any questions for me you can ask me there, or on a comment here on my website. :)

You guys will be hearing from me again soon!

I didn’t get too much done this summer unfortunately. My last semester ended mid-May, and I finished up all of Touhouvania Suika for Fanime; and then right after Fanime I had to work on Black Gold Saw for Anime Expo. I got 95% of BGS done, but I still have to improve her here and there… I need to completely redo her claws.

But for now I’ll be focusing on working on Sylvanas Windrunner for Blizzcon! I’m very excited to be working on her, but it’s definitely going to be a lot of work. I probably won’t be posting many entries here until Blizzcon unless I finish a major part of Sylvanas and want to document it here, so if you want to follow my work be sure to follow me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/VensyCosplay, I promise there will be plenty of updates there! :)

I think that’s it for my mini update.. I just wanted to let people know I’m not dead. Here’s some of the work I’ve done for Sylvanas so far:

These photos feature my sculpting work, in preparation for molding/casting them, as well as the start of my Intefoam armor work!

Progress has been slow – I’ll admit that, but I figured I might as well actually take some time off during my summer to relax and enjoy myself before school starts. But now that I feel I’ve relaxed more than enough it’s time to get into gear and pump this Cosplay out!

The design really called out to me as interesting, but I knew it would be difficult because of all the detailing. I was very thankful for such a good reference. I know a few other Touhouvania characters don’t have such nice references, but I do believe this cosplay without the reference sheet would be impossible because of all the detailed work.

I first started with working on the horns and gourd. I unfortunately don’t have any photos of the pre-mache stages. This is after I designed the horns and gourd in Illustrator, printed out the template, traced it in cardboard, did the expanding foam work, and carved it down to shape. I would then cover the piece in painter’s tape, followed by paper mache (this step).

Here’s the horns and gourd all plastered up. (I was also working on my Black Gold Saw horns at the same time) This is before I sanded all the plaster down, so it looks really rough at this stage.

Here’s a detail shot of the gourd when I was painting it. I detailed the cork to look as realistic as possible with a lot of texturing. From a foot away the cork looks real! The best way to do this step is to Google search a referenec of the texture you’re trying to imitate and emulate it as closely as possible. Contrast and subtle color changes are everything!

This shows all he swatching I did before working on the gourd. I made a nice palette of colors so that I’d have a nice array of natural colors using some of the color mixing skills I acquired from my Color Theory class at Otis. I used combinations of browns, yellows, reds, greens, and purples mainly to obtain these colors as well as a little bit of white here and there. I avoided using black though.

Here’s a picture of the detailed Kanji painting work I did on the gourd. I had a photo reference from the Griffon figurine for the labels and I would lightly sketch out the Kanji on the stickers first with pencil and then i would carefully paint them in. I had a difficult time deciding whether I wanted to use the original Suika gourd design or the Touhouvania gourd design (regular design has only two stickers, while Touhouvania has three). I ended up going with the Touhouvania design (since it would fit better, and just in case I never end up doing regular Suika anyways).

Then my issue was the fact that the back of the gourd would look so empty, so originally I made it so that any angle you looked at the gourd from you would always see either two or three stickers… But by the time the gourd was ready for Clear Acrylic Coating for protection, I kind of felt that the gourd looked too “busy” with a total of six stickers on it, so I ended up painting out two of the stickers, leaving me with four total, just for a little bit more visual interest.

The skirt was fun, but it took a lot of paint. I started it off with a circle skirt because it would be easier to paint. (Miraculously it was just the right size to work on my dining room table) I made a custom purple color by mixing different purple acrylics together to make the perfect blend I liked. When you know you’re going to paint a lot, it’s better to be safer than sorry and paint a lot of the color, so that you’re consistent. (I ended up using the same purple mixture for the shirt anyways)

As for painting it onto the skirt, I mixed the paint with fabric textile medium from Joann’s. I purchased two small bottles (in the photo they’re the two bottles on the left) but I only ended up using half of one for the entire project (which was very surprising to me). After I was done painting, I later had to reduce the circle skirt by a great amount to reduce the amount of visual overlap (that would have been too much of a problem with the hanging chains).

Here’s my shirt. it’s an altered version of a pattern I purchased. I used the same purple as the skirt to make the design. The design was made in Illustrator (one side, and then mirrored over to make the other side symmetrical). I then printed out the design and traced it with pencil on the shirt to have a stencil to follow for painting. The design at the top is pleather which I glued onto the shirt.

You can also see the collar in this piece; all the collars, bracers, and belts were made from scratch from one yard of pleather I purchased at the fashion district. I hand sewed all of them (not confident enough to use the machine to sew pleather yet).

I did these close to the end of the project because I couldn’t decide on the scale I wanted to use. It all depended on the size of the cube really because that one has to hang off of my hair. The cube and sphere are just Styrofoam shapes I purchased from Joann’s which I did the same painter’s tape and paper mache steps too. I added the D-rings onto them before adding the tape and mache, to give them more stability.

The pyramid I built out of my usual cardboard and expanding foam method. The most difficult out of all of these was the cube because I ended up having to carve down the cube from its original size – so I had some issues making sure all the sides were completely flat.

I don’t have any pictures of it, but the horns were attached to the wig directly by being hot glued to felt and then having the felt sewn onto the wig. It worked pretty well and was pretty sturdy, but if someone accidentally walked into my horn (which did happen a few times ;_;), they would slightly un-glue and I’d have to go back to my hotel room and repair them. I’m sure this technique would work perfectly for smaller horns, or more vertical ones (these had a lot of horizontal gravitational pull).

And there you have it, that’s pretty much a thorough description of all the WIP photos I have for Suika. :) If you have any other questions feel free to ask in a comment on this post or on my Touhouvania Suika Cosplay page.

New Photoshoot!

Here’s a shoot that I was in featuring my Suika Cosplay. :) Photos courtesy of BKaguya. The photos I selected for my site also feature Vash_Fanatic as Touhouvania Chen. This photoshoot was a lot of fun to do because I was actually drinking red wine out of my gourd, so I was pretty in character for Suika. xD I was just being ultra silly.

(More photos from the shoot can be found here.)

Remember if you want to see the most up-to-date updates from me in terms of Cosplay progress, then follow me on my Facebook page @ www.facebook.com/VensyCosplay :) I’ll be posting updates on Black Gold Saw and Synchronicity Miku there!

The photoshoot was a lot of fun even though we did get slightly rained out. The photoshoot was located at the First United Methodist Church in Pasadena, CA. We were a bit nervous about doing a photoshoot around a church, but luckily no one was really around so we were able to complete the photoshoot in peace.

John finished the photos today and so I added them to my Flandre Scarlet Cosplay page. I’ll link them here in this post as well though for convenience. :) Needless to say, I’m very confident in saying that I’m quite pleased with how this photoshoot came out. Thanks again John! We’ll have to do more shoots in the future!

In unrelated news, I’ve been in the middle of finals these past couple of weeks so I haven’t been quite able to do as much Cosplay progress as I would hope to; but my finals are over after next week so… expect a lot of Cosplay updates after school’s out!

Remember though if you want to see the most up-to-date updates from me in terms of Cosplay progress, then follow me on my Facebook page @ www.facebook.com/VensyCosplay.

Fanime Con 2011

May 27 – 30
The Anime and Japanese culture event held in San Jose, CA featuring special guests, gaming, concerts, and more.

For Fanime Con my goal is to get these two cosplays done for sure. The priority is to get Touhouvania Suika done for the Touhouvania group Royal Wings Cosplay is doing, hopefully I can get it done in time! I would love to get Black Gold Saw done for Fanime as well, but there are a couple factors in whether I’ll be taking her or not:

a) Whether I get her done or not in time
b) Whether my car gets fixed :(

If my car doesn’t get fixed then my friends and I are going to need to take our other car, a compact car, which probably won’t fit my giant sword in the car. T.T Maybe it will though! So let’s hope for the best! But if I don’t take her to Fanime Con, she’ll be at Anime Expo for sure.

Anime Expo 2011

July 1 – 4
Located in Los Angeles, California – Anime Expo, North America’s largest anime and manga convention, serves to foster trade, commerce and the interests of anime fans.

My primary cosplay is Synchronicity Miku, for my friend’s Synchronicity group. :) I look forward to making the staff and the accessories. On the side I’ll be putting together a Louise cosplay along with helping my boyfriend get his Saito cosplay ready. :D It should be fun~

BlizzCon 2011

October 21 – 22
BlizzCon® is a celebration of the global player communities surrounding the Warcraft®, StarCraft®, and Diablo® universes.

I am going to dedicate my entire summer vacation after Anime Expo to making this cosplay. :) I plan on entering the Costume Contest, so I have to make it as good as possible! I’ll be going to BlizzCon with my closest friends! I can’t wait!

Filler Cosplay

These are just cosplays I’ll be working on my spare time, so I’m in no rush to get them done at any particular point.

I’ve been putting off Mikuzukin for way too long, but it’s such a minor cosplay that I really don’t mind putting it off. :) I’ll finish it whenever I have a chance. It’s already like 40% done, I just haven’t had time to work on it! (Or no motivation)

As for Merry Nightmare, I’d love to do her, but since my schedule is pretty filled up (I haven’t even listed off all the characters I should be doing! I didn’t list at least two characters for Anime Expo, but due to certain circumstances I may not be able to do them) I have to put her off to the side as a filler cosplay. Hopefully by PMX or ALA I’ll have her though!

I’ll make another Cosplay list once Anime Expo is over because that marks the end of a cosplay year for me! Hope to see you at these conventions! ♥

Summer vacation in less than a month! I can’t wait!