So you’re doing your first cosplay… - Rintare

You might be feeling self-conscious or scared about doing your first cosplay… It’s a big step to enter the world of cosplay and it can be a scary step to take! Luckily for you, there is so much out there for you to learn from. There tons and tons of blogs, videos, tutorials, and other cosplay community members out there just waiting to help you out! You are most definitely not going into it alone!

In my opinion, the most important thing about cosplay is exuding confidence!!! Even if you’re feeling uneasy now, when it’s the day of the convention, or photoshoot, or whatever it is, you better be the shining pinnacle of confidence! Confidence is key! I know it’s been said many times over, but if you are feeling self-conscious and down about yourself, it will show! After all, you should have nothing to feel bad about if you’ve done all this hard work slaving away for your cosplay. Even if you didn’t make your own cosplay, have confidence in the effort you put into hair, makeup, and whatever else you spent 3 hours watching YouTube videos for. Be proud!

Another way I think we cosplayers can exude confidence is by becoming the character! Do not let the costume wear YOU! You are that character for the day, so be freed from your concerns. On the day of the event (convention, photoshoot, etc.) make sure you are the best you can be! Your hair and makeup is on POINT! Your costume fits you like a glove and there isn’t a wrinkle in sight! If your cosplay has some flaws…rock it with confidence!!

Here are some more specific tips I think may help!

Costume

• Gather references of your character/outfit. A lot!!
•    Regardless of whether it’s bought or made, make sure it fits you and flatters your body shape!
•  Make alterations where needed! Shorten a skirt, hem some pants, pull in a shirt, do what it takes to get the perfect fit!
•  Remember…we are not cartoon characters with stick thin arms and legs with mile long torsos! 
• As you’re planning out a cosplay expect to run into some proportion issues. Just adjust accordingly.
• Don’t bite off more than you can chew! You should have adequate time and resources for the cosplay you want to do.

Hair

•  It can be hard to match colors and styles for your character. Just do the best you can and sometimes that means putting a wig in your cart and praying it’s the right color!
• Wig hair is not real hair and it needs to be treated as such! Learn everything you can about what you’re trying to accomplish. Even if you’re just trimming, make sure your cutting technique is the right one.
•  Hairspray is your friend.

Makeup

• Look at references or look to other cosplayers whose makeup you really like!
• PRACTICE PRACTICE PRACTICE!!! There is nothing better to do!
• Watch tons of videos! Technique is very important!
• Don’t think you can get away with cheapy makeup, spend the money where it needs to be spent so your makeup doesn’t melt off of your face!
• If someone else is doing your makeup, ask them to tell you about their process and why they’re doing whatever step they’re doing.

In short, take the time to learn your craft and the time you put into it will be the result you get out of it. You should always be learning and learning and learning and then MORE LEARNING!! Learn how to be the best you can be and then GET BETTER!! Be confident in what you’re doing! Radiate dat confidence and go out there and slaaay!!

Thank you for reading!

Super Easy Kotori Hair Loop Quick Tutorial (Love Live)

Hey everyone! This is Rintare with a reaalllyy quick tutorial on how to do Kotori's (Love Live) hair loop. I know a lot of people have trouble with this, so I just wanted to share my own take on it. I hope you find this helpful!

Here's the finished loop! Read on to see what I did!

So for starters, the Kotori wig I purchased came with a small ponytail clip to attach to the wig. I know not all wigs come like this, so sorry if this tutorial doesn't apply to you! The wig I purchased was from aliexpress: here

First, take out the ponytail clip, brush it out, make sure it's all nice, yadda yadda!

Next, take a small section of hair from the top layer of the ponytail. You want to make sure you're not taking too much hair or else you will begin to see the netting underneath. I took about an inch or so wide of a section.

Third, begin forming your loop by flipping this section of hair forward (so it's in front of the teeth of the clip)! Here's a side view of that:

Fourth, go ahead and clamp that section with the clip! You can clamp so the loop is a little smaller and pull the hair up to your desired length. Spread the hair out at the top so it looks loopy!

Next, you might want to secure the loop with a hair tie so it stays! (I didn't do that yet because I plan on fixing up my whole wig later on). Somewhere around where my thumb is should be perfect!

Finally, HAIRSPRAY IT. Use the best hairspray you can find! The kind that freezes the hair in place. I find that Pantene Pro-V 24 Hour Volume Hairspray works well for me. A lot of people are a fan of got2b freeze spray as well.

Tada! All ready to be attached to your wig base.

You are now ready to clip your ponytail clip and loop onto the main wig base. Be careful not to let your loops fall out of the teeth in the process! I clip it onto a section of hair that I gathered previously. On the wig base, it's basically a side-half-ponytail and I just clip right over where I tied that section. Here's a reference that may help:

I also find that many wigs are styled so that Kotori's loop is also what makes her ahoge (the little tuft of hair on top of her head). I don't think this is the case after thoroughly researching it for myself! To style the ahoge I just grabbed a little piece of hair from the top of the wig and teased it. I hope this tutorial was clear, easy, and helpful!! Have fun styling, little birds!

Ryuu Lyon's Weapon Prop Tutorial - Part 1: Planning Proportions

Hey everyone! Kuritare here with my process on how we/I create props. Today I'm working on Ryuu Lyon's main weapon (Staff/Sword?) from Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? (ダンジョンに出会いを求めるのは間違っているだろうか). I am just going to refer to it as Danmachi.

*Here I am using Photoshop, but you can use GIMP to make and measure your lines.

So Rintare is going to be Ryuu, so we are going to scale the item to Rintare. Since we actually don't know the height of Ryuu (which is actually irrelevant since we're scaling it ourselves),

So first, I measured the height of Ryuu in pixels (px). It came out to be 1798px. I then measured the length of the staff at 1019px. So with these two measurements we can begin to create our ratio of inches per pixel. This way we can convert anything we know from pixels to inches. Rintare's height is  5 feet and 6 inches = 66 inches. So now we know thet 66 inches = 1789 px. if we do 66/1789 = .0367in/px. Now we can apply this ratio to all our lines and get the measurement in inches. So in the end we get that the staff is 37.4 inches long.

After all these calculations, I wanted to see what the stick's shape was like. So I took the above screencap from the anime and redrew and colored the weapon to get the larger picture. I included the shading given in the anime in order to get a feel for the roundness/edging of the weapon as well.

To get a feel for the width of the whole thing, I went ahead and applied our ratio to the thinnest and largest part of the weapon. The item itself seems a little unreasonable if I'm to make it out of wood, so I will be adjusting them so that it is structurally sound.

That's the planning process! In part 2 I'll go over the actual creation. Stay tuned.

Shiro's Crown Tutorial (No Game No Life)

Sup! Rintare in da building. So, I said I was going to share the process behind my Shiro crown that I made for Katsucon 2015 and here it is! I really wanted my Shiro to resemble the figure more so than the anime, so I pulled my references for the crown from the figure.I guess I'll try to make this as tutorial-y as I can. Sorry in advance for lack of pictures as I didn't capture every single step of this!

Stuff I used:

• Craft foam (I just used a few yellow sheets from Michaels, but I painted over them anyway so it doesn't really matter!)
• Xacto knife or something to cut with precision
• Spray paint + primer
• Wire (I'm not too sure about the specifics of the wire, but it is slightly thicker than a wire clothes hanger?)
• Gems!!
• Craft adhesive of your choice (I used a hot glue gun)
• Aligator clips for putting the crown in your hair!

 So first I made a paper mock-up after Kuritare did some dimensional analysis on the figure to match the size to me. Despite all the number crunching, I still needed some adjustments because well...I'm not an anime figure and I'm much taller than Shiro. I made...a lot of paper mock-ups before I was satisfied with all the angles. The structure is strange because the crown is not a complete circle. Shiro and Sora apparently break a crown in half,  but this crown is really far from being a half circle. It appears to be about 7/8th of a circle, just enough room for a ponytail to fit through.
After tracing the mock-up onto the foam, I drew the mock-up again with the decorative ridges (? I guess I'll call it that).

The crown is made up of 7 pieces.
I laid my mock-up on top of the foam to trace!

The decorative piece was cut out separately from the 7 crown parts.
It was one continuous and very narrow piece of foam,
so the tips of the crown where VERY fragile.

So, in total I had 9 pieces of foam: the 7 pieces, the long, skinny, and fragile decorative piece which also helps to hide the separation between the 7 main pieces, and a backing piece which I used to glue the main 7 pieces onto (so they have something to align to) which is not pictured, but you'll see it later.

Here's a tiny mock foam crown I made to test.
I'm like a fairy god parent!

Next, I painted all my pieces! First, I went over each piece with spray paint primer (it's white). I think this also helped fill in the porous foam as well to make the crown look smoother. Primer and two coats of gold did the trick.

A quick paint test on a foam strip. This is two coats after primer! 

Liquid gold *v* Also this is the paint I used! Shiny gold cap!

Here is everything all painted and laid out!
Ready for assembly!

 Now I just glued and glued and glued! Below you'll find the picture of a main crown piece as I glue it to the backing piece. I decided to use two pieces of wire because I didn't want the crown pieces to be teetering on one piece of wire. So, I glued the wire to the backing and then glued the pieces on. Finally, I glued the decorative piece on. I then CAREFULLY bent the whole crown into the right shape. It was very scary.

A glimpse of the backing piece and the wires.

PHEW!!

The ponytail clip for the wig fit perfectly in the gap.

 Great! Next, I had to pick out the right gems for the job! Luckily, my big bag of gems from Michaels had all the large gems I needed and Lili gave me some small oval gems as well. Because I used premade gems, I obviously wasn't going to be accurate, but I think they did the job just fine. Making your own gems can be expensive and time consuming!

BAG-O-GEMS (spilled out on my desk)

Tada! all gems glued on.

Here's a sample of how I attached alligator clips.
I used 2 for the finished crown.

Our friend Shifty Cosplay also asked me to make him a Sora crown. The process was similar except I just made it one huge piece of foam. There's a back piece and wire as well.

The gems were pretty off for this, but..eh.

Crown debut in our Katsu hotel room!

A hall shot of  Shifty Cosplay and I. 

Thanks for reading! I hope you found this at least somewhat helpful! I would be happy to answer any questions about it too. (= 3=)

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