Tutorials – glitzparty . studios

Let’s Talk Pattern Drafting – Sleeves (Part 2)

I have a good excuse for missing last week’s post! I had surgery on Monday! While I could’ve probably pushed myself to get something out on Tuesday, I prioritized my health (for once!) and rested up instead. Now it’s… the following Thursday. Happy Tutorial Thursday, y’all!

So, I trust that everyone went out and made their basic blocks last week, because we’ll actually be needing them this week for our sleeve drafting! If you haven’t, mosey on over to part 1 in this series and get that pattern ready!

Now, sleeves are the bane of most people’s existence when it comes to sewing, much less drafting a pattern. Being able to make a good sleeve is a skill that you will never regret honing, so we’ll start with a basic sleeve block, talk about how to adjust some weirdness in the fit that may arise when you attempt to put it on the basic block and discuss a few neat adjustments you can make to get different shapes in your sleeves.

But first!

Let’s Make A Basic Sleeve

Let’s Talk Pattern Drafting (Part 1)

The first time I made my own piece of clothing without a pattern and without modifying another existing piece of clothing, it worked out better than I expected, truth be told. It still felt awful to wear and tugged in all the wrong places, but it was something I could put on. It was this shirt right here.

*Ah, 2003. It was a simpler time for cosplay!*

Looking at this shirt, it’s probably not readily apparent where the flaws are. I know that they’re in the fit of the shoulders and arms, primarily. The sleeves are a little too snug on the bicep, the top of the shoulders is weirdly flat and it’s hard for me to actually put my arm over my head like in that photo. It looked okay and felt terrible, but hey, I made it myself!

So how did Baby Jay at the ripe ol’ age of 14 manage a semi-functional garment? The pattern looked something like this:

Note: This is not a real pattern, it’ll look awful if you try to use it as such!

Now, how do I know that’s what it looked like over 15 years later?

Easy, it’s the same exact pattern I used when making Anders in 2012:

And again with Nathaniel in 2013:

And all of our Attack On Titan jackets in 2014? You guessed it!

What about Kenny Crow in 2017?

And… Leo?!

Okay, but surely in 2018 I did Leo differe–

Nope! Every single one of these costumes started with that same rough shape, even if some pieces got changed around slightly. At this point in my cosplay career, I’m not afraid of making really bizarre patterns or things that are super tightly tailored, but that’s because I have the foundation necessary to tackle weirdness and alterations.

How does one build a foundation?

With BLOCKS of course!

Making Of: Erhardt (Part 1)

When Octopath Traveler came out, I was beyond excited to dive into it and really see what it had to offer. With 8 main characters, it seemed tailor-made for our usual group plus a few of our usual add-on members, but I ended up struggling to figure out which character best suited me and that I liked. Glitz was a shoe-in for Cyrus but despite my appreciation of Therion, I realized halfway into making him that I just… wouldn’t look good. I wouldn’t look decent. It was going to be a hot mess, and it wouldn’t be fun for me as a result.

OPT was really fun and had a lot of really beautiful character designs, so it wasn’t hard to find secondary characters that appealed to me. I initially fell in love with Captain Leon, but alas! There’s no actual art of him, only his overworld sprite. That, coupled with the lack of a confirmed Tressa for our group, left me with the understanding that I would be the ‘can you move so I can get a picture of the Octopaths?’ guy if I were to commit to him.

My second choice went to Erhardt who had a lovely battle sprite and some concept art to base my costume decisions on. His outfit was also a pallette swap of Olberic’s default costume, so any further details I would be able to glean from the more detailed and varied artwork available for him.

Image result for erhardt octopath — His hair is for aesthetics, not practicality!

The problem arose again: would anyone recognize me without an Olberic for context? Thankfully, after making Alfyn, Type09 decided that he wanted to do the Warmaster variant of Olberic, so I set out to finally make my own Octopath costume!

Let’s Talk About Forrest’s Wig

When starting on Forrest, there were a lot of things that I would be doing for the first time (or pseudo-first time, at least!) and not least of which was the wig. Forrest has very distinctive, huge sausage curls in typical Nohrian royal fashion, so I knew rollers wouldn’t cut it. I’d have to go bigger and fuller for the right look.

Trust me, Forrest, I’m as uneasy as you are about all of this.

Let’s Talk About Gelatin Molds

This post originally appeared on the GlitzParty Cosplay Facebook in 2017. It has been preserved for posterity to aid other cosplayers here!

We’re still unpacking and getting our workshops set up, so you’ll all have to wait a little on the next part of the armor patterning tutorial series. Instead, we have some quick experiments to catch you guys up on that we did over the weekend! Let #TutorialTuesday commence!

We’ve been interested in molding and casting for years but the cost-barrier was too high for us to gamble on. As with a lot of advanced cosplay techniques, we would have to have at least $100 to potentially waste testing out new materials and how they work. We tried some low-grade molding and casting over the years with varied success, but we finally had an extra chunk of change to spend on some Smooth-On products and took the plunge a few months back.

Though our results tend to be usable, we’ve still lost a fair amount of material to things that we were only going to make a few of. We also found that in trying to stay cheap and reusing the same clay, we were unable to make totally smooth/even blanks to cast from. Always perfectionists, we found that most of our casts needed some TLC once they popped out, which really put a damper on our cold-casting since they can’t be sanded down lest they lose their metallic layer. Iterative molding would be more expensive than it was worth and we didn’t want to constantly be firing our clay for permanent bucks. We had to find a better way.

Enter the gelatin mold.

Our weekend experiments were done following an interesting Instructable we stumbled upon a while back for gelatin molding and casting. It seemed like the perfect way to do iterative molding and keep with our reusable molding/casting theme.

Let’s Talk About Armor Making – Planning For Armor Pieces

This post originally appeared on the GlitzParty Cosplay Facebook in 2017. It has been preserved for posterity to aid other cosplayers here!

#WhoopsItsWednesday instead of #TutorialTuesday this week. Things have been really hectic but we wanted to continue a little of last week’s tutorial since so many people found it useful! Once we have electricity (still working on that!) and are settled into our new workshop, we’ll continue with some more detailed tutorials on how we go from these blueprints to actual costume pieces!

Let’s Talk About Armor Making – Breaking Up Reference Art

This post originally appeared on the GlitzParty Cosplay Facebook in 2017. It has been preserved for posterity to aid other cosplayers here!

We’re back for another #TutorialTuesday everyone! Our move has gotten set back a bit since we still don’t have electricity in the new place, so the planned molding/casting tutorial is getting pushed back for now, but we got some requests for help figuring out where to even start with armor! We took a little time to throw together a how-to on converting your reference from an overwhelming mess to easier to manage individual pieces. Let us know what you think of this tutorial, anything that’s unclear about it and where you’d like us to go from here!

Let’s Talk About Feathered Armor

This post originally appeared on the GlitzParty Cosplay Facebook in 2017. It has been preserved for posterity to aid other cosplayers here!

This week’s #TechniqueTuesday is a throwback to the two versions of Anders we made from Dragon Age. When we planned out our first two DA costumes, we had extra time and money to put into learning some new skills. After doing a fair amount of squinting at references, we decided that leather would be accurate for the setting and type of attire. We also thought we could try some cool stuff to make all the shoulder fluff.

Let’s Talk About Staining and Aging

This post originally appeared on the GlitzParty Cosplay tumblr in 2012. It has been preserved for posterity to aid other cosplayers here!

when distressing clothes for cosplay, there are two main points to consider: the colour and the texture of the cloth. one without the other is not usually sufficient. if you stain something but it looks otherwise pristine and new, you won’t have the safe affect on the viewer as you would with both. similarly, you may not end up noticing the physical distressing if the colouration is otherwise really clean.

i’m going to break this into two different parts in separate posts. any questions can be dropped into my ask and i’ll answering them as i go. Continue reading “Let’s Talk About Staining and Aging”

Let’s Talk About Vulpes Inculta’s Hood

This post originally appeared on the GlitzParty Cosplay tumblr in 2012. It has been preserved for posterity to aid other cosplayers here!

Anonymous asked: OMG where did you get that awesome Vulpes hat

i made it, actually!

i’ve had this question come up a few times lately so i guess i should address it. lately being at the con, mostly. if you heard from a young lady wearing it that she bought it in the dealer’s room, you probably also believe she works for NASA, so disregard the rest of this post and go about your business.

firstly, i am not the vulpes inculta cosplayer. i am the arcade gannon cosplayer. glitzkrieg is the vulpes.

secondly, the hood was made from scratch from an actual coyote pelt. we bought it pre-tanned and sliced it up for hood-making.