Melisandre Cosplay (WIP): Necklace

Long time no update! Last time I began showing progress on my Melisandre cosplay, I had only created the pattern which is shown at the end of this post. I got the shape, I just needed to find the most inexpensive material that would get the job done. I also needed to somehow make a 3D gem for the center of the necklace. I was worried I wouldn’t find anything I liked and would have to just paint cardboard which I really wanted to avoid because I don’t want it to look 2D.

My last ditch effort would be clay, but luckily I found a pendant close to the shape I wanted and I went about painting over it. I’m not done just yet, the picture below is the base paint to cover the flower design, I will be doing one more layer of red.

Painting that pendant made my bathroom look like a crime scene, all that red! I started by painting a dark red and layering that over and over again until the flower design was almost non-existent. Then I applied a brighter red with less brown mixed in, after that dried I applied a few patches of straight up brown and then more plain red on top. The reason for all of this was to make it look aged as I’m sure that necklace of hers is super old. I then put it on a chain to see how it would look (the actual chain won’t be used for now).

Tomorrow I’ll begin applying the pattern I made and cutting it out and hopefully painting that as well. I would love to get this necklace done this weekend so all I would have left is the sewing of the dress. I have a pattern for it, I just need fabric! Here is the pattern for the necklace that I have ready to go for tomorrow:

After the necklace, my to-do list is as so:
-Buy fabric for dress
-Sew the dress
-Find shoes
-Get a good makeup palette for this look
-Get some curlers for the wig and lots of bobby pins

I would be so happy to have this done for a con next month!! I planned on originally having this done for a different con in April, but if I could have it done sooner that would be much better.

 

2015 Art Goals

When I was thinking about my goals for 2015, they fell into one of two categories: travel and art. Every year since I was in high school, I had at least one goal that dealt with getting better at art in some shape or form. I did really well this past year; I took a drawing/painting course at a nearby art studio, attended a couple of exhibits at the art museum, completed my first cosplay (Trucy Wright from Ace Attorney), and made a few pretty cool crafts for my apartment.

I hit a few lows this year and being able to get through those and keep up with my creative work is something I aim to continue. Usually when I hit a low point, any creative drive I have vanishes and I don’t want that to happen anymore.

So! My creative goals for this upcoming year:
-Finish 4 cosplays (more are welcome): Melisandre from GoT,  Suki from ATLA, Kamala Khan as Ms. Marvel and Misa Amane from Death Note.
– If I have the money, take a photography course and oil painting course.
– Write and illustrate a kid’s storybook.
-Improve my drawing technique.
-Create 2 Game of Thrones crafts for the apartment (and one for my brother).
– Make a couple new crafts for the apartment that aren’t GoT related.

That’s it for now! I’m hoping to post my progress and completed works as well since I was never one to share my work in the past. I find I’m more motivated to complete a project the more I share them. So to end this post I’ll leave you with the most my most recent drawing: Yubaba from Spirited Away. I got a huge creative surge after watching the movie and thinking about all the imaginative work that goes into these movies (Studio Ghibli films) and decided to try drawing a character. I chose Yubaba because she has such exaggerated and larger than life features and that was a lot of fun to draw. I even tried my hand at shading (which I usually skip) and am pretty pleased with the result.

Happy new year, everybody 😀 I hope you accomplish all you set out to do and thank you for following along as I try the same~

Homemade Christmas Gifts: WIP

What I’m about to show is actually still a work in project and I don’t know just yet how I’m going to go about it. See, my boyfriend and I are tight on cash with the holiday season coming up. I just got a new job this month after being unemployed for a month and a half and he has a minimum wage part time job while being in college. SO. As you can guess, our situation + buying gifts for my family + his family of 8 + each other + paying rent and utilities wreaked havoc on our bank accounts.

I decided to compromise. I said we could get each other one thing and make each other something else that way it’s even and it’s cheaper. Since we just watched My Neighbor Totoro and thought it was the most adorable thing ever, I thought i’d make him a collection of drawings put together. I drew May, some soot spirits, Totoro and the little totoros. I still want to draw saplings and acorns to round it out but I’m not entirely sure how I want to take care of the background.  I was thinking about printing out the background to the opening credits and gluing them on that, but I also want the cardboard I’m putting this on to be round. I have just a few days to figure something out! Here it is so far:

Crafts: ornaments my brother and I made as a kid

I don’t understand how December is flying by so fast! I haven’t made any custom ornaments yet 😦 I did however, head back to the suburbs to help my brother decorate the Christmas tree, our long standing tradition. We blast music of some sort (not at all Christmas related and usually more so classic rock) and make the tree look glamorous…ish. We don’t use many of those beautiful, uniform glass sphere ornaments, we mostly use weird/interesting ornaments (we have a lot of cows) and ones we made as kids.

Even though I have a lot to learn, I like to think I’m fairly decent at crafting things. It’s so funny because with some kids, you’ll look at their drawings when they’re young and you just KNOW they’re going to be good at art. If you were to look at my art you’d think “hmmm…maybe her parents convinced her to go into sports”. My work sucked and not even in an “awwww little kid’s art” kind of way. Which is exactly why I love seeing my old work and why I love that my parents have kept these pictures and ornaments for over 20 years.

So to celebrate, I thought it would be fun to share some of the ornaments I made as a kid. Only a few survived and my brother made one of them too.

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Top left: a very….interesting angel I made. I apparently knew nothing about how to make a triangle dress and tore it apart and stuck it together with a nice glue job. The icing on top is the awful expression and hair I put in with pen.

The candy cane was hard to mess up, I just put beads over a pipe cleaner. The snowflake looks good, but it’s face lost the battle to time with one of the eyes falling off 😛 I have no idea why I chose to add gold dots everywhere though! I don’t even think I liked the color gold. Fun fact, my favorite color as a kid was sea foam green.

Finally, my brother made the star. I think it’s especially great because we’re not even Jewish and he decided to make that ornament. Our tree is a little more diverse now 🙂

Do you have any of the crafts/ornaments/pictures you made as a kid? What’s your favorite thing you made as a kid?

Cosplay WIP: Lady Melisandre from Game of Thrones

For Emerald City Comicon 2015, I plan on making a Lady Melisandre cosplay. In a perfect world my brother would be Jon Snow (because he looks like Jon Snow anyway) and my boyfriend would be Stannis but they know squat about making costumes and I’m too rusty to sewing/new to cosplaying to make good armor. SIGH. I suppose it’ll be fine to be Melisandre by myself 🙂

I purchased the cloak already but plan on constructing and sewing the dress and making her necklace. Since I lack an iron, an ironing board and fabric, I can’t make the dress just yet (hopefully I will once Christmas is over) so I’m starting with the necklace first.

I’m going the cheap and easy route by NOT making an actual necklace; I’m using flexible cardboard and some paint and hoping for the best. If anyone has suggestions, I’m open to them! For now though, I worked on the pattern for the necklace by first tracing the general shape and then cutting out the pieces. I colored them in for fun. I still have to make the little bars in between each piece, but it’s coming together! I’ll be transferring it to cardboard soon.

Pictures below:

Animal Crossing Designs: Post Two

To those who celebrate: Happy (semi-belated) Thanksgiving!! It’s my favorite holiday and I have 3 dinners to attend spanning Thursday-Saturday and could not be more excited because STUFFING. I also recently got a new job and did a little splurging to celebrate. I got: Silent Hill: Homecoming, Pokemon Alpha Sapphire, and Persona Q. I’ll be busy for a while ! I’ll do posts on those games eventually, once I get a bit further into them.

I wanted to have another craft post up before Thanksgiving, but I actually ran out of paint and wasn’t going to walk 40 minutes in the freezing snow to retrieve 1 tube of paint. So I’ll hopefully finish this project by the end of next week assuming I get to the craft store (I start work on Wednesday). I wanted to make a little sign for our kitchen to spruce it up a bit. I ordered some craft wood panels and am going to paint them and stencil in: Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme. It’s a nod to both my boyfriend and mine’s green thumb and his love for Simon and Garfunkel.

So in the mean time, I decided to post some more Animal Crossing New Leaf designs I’ve made! I pretty much exhausted all the Disney princesses, so I made some Marvel, DC, League of Legends, and Pokemon designs!

Using Leftover Craft Supplies to Redecorate

I recently moved in with my boyfriend and even after moving some of my stuff over, it still felt like his place. While I can’t do much about the furniture (which is all his), I decided I would tackle another section of the apartment: the walls. We can’t paint them, but we can decorate them, yet my boyfriend hasn’t invested any time sprucing them up. I, on the other time, spend a lot of time trying to make sure my living space is full of art and color. My room at home was covered: I had 3 large collages full of fashion editorials and ads I liked, a bulletin board that had pictures from cities I’d like to visit and all my Dad’s records (well, my favorites of them, and don’t worry – I got his approval for this).

Christmas is Coming: DIY Pokeball Ornaments

Before you go on a disgusted “BUT THANKSGIVING HASN’T EVEN HAPPENED YET” rant, allow me explain. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, but something is actually coming sooner that that: Pokemon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire Remakes!! I’ve been a pokefangirl since the TV show first aired and Pokemon Red came out. I used to play Team Rocket’s Jessie to my crush’s James during recess at school. We would basically sing the theme song and then run around pretending to catch a pikachu. Young love, amirite?

While I eventually lost touch with that kid, my love for Pokemon has remained over the years. I’ve played all the games with the exception of the Black/White sequels and X & Y. My gaming interests changed and I couldn’t find it in me to sit and level up over and over again. I will be putting that aside though, for Alpha Sapphire since the R/S/E generation was actually my favorite out of all the games (Crystal version coming in a close second).

Craft Post: Steampunk/Victorian Inspired Flower Pot

I know. You may be looking at this and thinking ???? Steampunk??? It looks entirely Victorian and not very steamy nor punky. I was initially going to stencil on some gears and paint those but I thought it would look too busy, so I left it as is. Overall, I’m really happy with how it turned out, but I do wish the red was darker. It looked like it would be brownish-red on the tube of paint but came out more red than anything. I would like to make another one with a darker color scheme and maybe add some more steampunk elements 😉

How it was made:

A Look Back on My First Cosplay: Trucy Wright

Even though I have been playing games since I was four and have been a big fan of anime, graphic novels/comics and cosplays, I have only been to two conventions. Both of which were this past year! I always wanted to go to one, I just didn’t think my parents would fully understand it and would want to control everything I did. I wanted to go to a con when I could afford it and than includes making a costume as well as attending AND BUYING SO MUCH MERCH.

That happened this year, my senior year of college. I looked at my bank account and asked my boyfriend if he’d like to attend with me because rain or shine I was finally going and no one was going to stop me! Once I got my tickets booked for C2E2 and Anime Central, I started thinking about what costume I could make. I knew I wanted to do something from my all time favorite game series: Ace Attorney, but didn’t know who. While I was flipping through my Art of Ace Attorney book, I came to Trucy’s page and stopped. She has SUCH a cute and fun outfit. It’s not a monochromatic suit, it didn’t look too complicated, it’s colorful and most importantly, looked like it would be a blast to make.

Then I started assembling my game plan (which I may have done during my classes when I should have been taking notes because WOW senior year was not easy).  I already had a black dress that looked like the one she wears, so I decided I would focus on making the cape, hat, buttons, and brooch. It was relatively cheap to make and since I’m new to costume making, it was done the only way I really knew how: with paint, markers & hand sewing. My sewing machine I had in high school broke and I hadn’t touched one since my sophomore year sewing class. It proved to be a bit of a challenge.