That Thing I Wore

A couple of weeks ago, I posted the incredibly long description of how I made my RWBY prop for Anime Boston 2014. I used words like 'rapid prototyping' and '3D printing' to make it sound all fancy and like I had a clue about what I was doing.

Well I didn't, at least at first, but I got a better handle on the techniques used to put my Myrtenaster together (and keep it together) as the build progressed. For my taste, however, in that last post there was not enough usage of the term 'duct tape'. It failed to clearly convey how much of a slap-dash process my cosplay builds usually are. I seek to remedy that by relaying the tale of how I got the costume itself together.

Alas, I did not take many (read: any) pictures of the costume in progress. So this will be a short and sweet post about the dangers of fabric spray-paint and the wonders of last minute shopping trips to the guys section of a clothing store. There will be pictures, there will be reasonable description, and I will aim to keep you amused.

Big picture, because it's the detail that matters

The costume was constructed from a base of white pants and a white tailored jacket (for less that $50 total on a last-minute shopping trip to the nearest mall-equivalent) and a pair of white golf shoes (fortuitously found fro $16 at a local thrift store). This is pretty standard for most of my cosplays: I try and find base pieces for relatively cheap at local stores and then alter them as needed.

The alterations to this costume are fairly evident in the above photo. I cut some tails from white fabric and duct taped them to the back of the jacket. I also hemmed these fabric pieces with white duct tape, which gave the tails structure and a clean cut. It is a trick I have learned for cutting fabric -- if you put duct tape behind the areas you want to cut through, any scissor you care to use will make a straight line. It is a really useful tool for those of us who do not have fabric scissors.

I then spray-painted several select areas blue in the style of Weiss (the girl version). The fabric spray paint was a bit of an experiment for this particular cosplay. I found it online and thought it would be useful to try -- I had not learned yet that airbrushed paint could do the job even better. Instead, I learned that fabric spray paint can be very difficult to handle. It is prone to bleeding and to uneven application.

However, if you buy the upholstering spray-paint, most of the application problems disappear. The company accidentally sent me blue upholstering paint in my second order from them, and it was a godsend for this cosplay. The color became more saturated than I intended, but it was also much smoother and professional-looking.

The details on the back of the jacket were done with acrylic paint and a paintbrush. I attempted to use a lasercut stencil at first, but the spray-paint did not want to comply with staying inside the stencil lines. It was much easier to just paint the damn thing on.

And that is about it! Once the jacket was altered (I sewed the sides a bit to get rid of some of the girly structure to the waist) and painted, the costume was ready to go.

It held up pretty well throughout the con. My only real issue by the end of the day were the shoes (note: golf shoes are damn uncomfortable. Never, ever wear them without incredibly thick socks to match).

And voila. The final product. It was much fun.

The male cadre from a parellel RWBY universe dispatches the original Ruby Rose. There's some symbolism in this, I swear.

Dude Blake and Dude Weiss duke it out.