alice[at] procosplay.com
EnglishJapanFrenchGermanItalianPortugueseRussianSpanish
You currently have
in your basket.
RSS

Blog posts tagged with 'Cosplay Tutorial'

Cosplay for newbies-Cosplay location tips

When looking to create your own cosplay suit (assuming that is you don’t intend to just buy a complete one online), it helps to learn the very important rule of thinking outside the box. As unusual and specific as most characters costume components are, sometimes the most difficult piece can be easily found in the least likely of places. For starters, let’s begin with where to find fabrics. Stores like Joann Fabrics or local fashion stores like Vogue or any nearby material store can help you find the fabrics and materials you need from sewing needles, patterns, threads, and all sorts of important components. When it comes to patterns, be sure to keep an open mind and look at other kinds of outfits that may appear close or seem like they carry a good likeness to the character you are trying to create. Halloween patterns for costumes like pirates, Jedi knights, or ball gown dresses may be used and modified when using the pattern to create different (or all) sections of your costume. It’s important to make sure you can sew or know someone who can sew WELL if you’re trying to build your costume.

       When it comes to other parts like gloves, boots, headbands, holsters, or odd things like wings and weapons, it helps to literally look everywhere. Sometimes your character’s gloves can be found in the garden section at Home Depot, or if your character has purple or different colored hands, latex gloves from a hospital or nearby Walgreens may have the very same colored gloves you need for your hands. Everything from scuba goggles to plastic skeleton bones or cardboard can be cut, shaped, resized, and modified to fit your costume’s various needs. Of course, local costume shops or Halloween stores will be more than able to help you out with make-up, eye contact lenses, wigs, masks, prosthetic teeth or limbs, so I recommend trying to find a costume store that is open all year around and not just during the Halloween season. Now all of these things like wigs and fabrics can be extremely expensive, it depends on how far you are willing to pay, drive or go for to get the parts you want.

       Of all the places I can recommend to go searching for cosplay parts, the best in terms of variety and being easy on your wallet is you’re local Good Will store or thrift shops or even garage sales. Any store that takes in goods and resells them like clothes and toys would be an ideal spot for cosplay parts. Why you may ask? Because people donate and give away all kinds of things from golf clubs, chairs, toys to sweaters and vests etc. Good Will and thrift stores can carry virtually any kind of piece of clothing you could need from shirts, vests, ties, hats, shoes, I’ve found many perfectly identical costume parts for my cosplays in Good Will stores more times than I have in any costume or Halloween shop. It may take some rummaging and searching and sometimes you may not always find just what you want and may have to modify it to suit your needs better, but more often than not, you would be truly surprised at how many perfect cosplay parts you can find at thrift stores or stores that take donated clothes and toys and such. As they say, one man’s trash is another man’s gold, or in this case, one man’s donation is another man’s cosplay part.

Cosplay for newbies:How to choose your first cosplay

How to choose your first cosplay

   When it comes to getting into the world of Cosplay (short for costume play), it can become a very expensive, daunting, exhausting and complicated hobby to partake, but if handled right, it can serve to be a wonderful and satisfying hobby for many years to come. However, when you’re starting out for the first time, it is very important to make a cosplay that is simple, easy, and inexpensive since as a newbie, you can’t jump into the big leagues at the drop of a hat. Everyone started at the bottom at one point and if you’re reading this, then you’re at the bottom and want to work your way to the top. Best characters to try out for newbies, as far as the simplest ones goes, would be characters that dress in normal clothes and by normal clothes, I mean characters with easy, normal looking, average every day clothes you might find an average person wearing. Someone like L or Light Yagami from “Death Note” for example, Takizawa from “Eden of the East” (or anyone from that show for that matter) or any character from the music inspired show “BECK: Mongolian Chop Squad” would also serve as simple, average cosplays for newbies.

Light from Death Note

Light from Death Note

Takizawa From Eden of the East

Takizawa From Eden of the East

       Though, even if you are a newbie at cosplaying, it helps if your dress up as someone recognizable even if it is a simple cosplay. For example, Ash or Misty from the well-known series “” are very easy cosplays to perform and VERY recognizable and expected at local conventions or cosplay gatherings.  Characters from “High School of the Dead” are also easy to perform, though they will require some intentionally designed “wear and tear” such as scrapes, scratches, or blood splatter marks to coincide with the zombie nature of the show. That’s another great thing about cosplaying 101, very simple things such as splatter marks or a rip or tear can help turn an everyday outfit into an iconic outfit or uniform that matches a character from an anime series. Characters from the show “Ranma ½” are a bit more geared towards oriental styled (naturally) but still, many of their uniforms and outfits are very simple and would make for very easy beginners outfits.

Pokemon Cosplay

Pokemon Cosplay

High School of the Dead

High School of the Dead

       Usually anime that are geared in real life (normal realities devoid of robots, aliens, vampires etc) are usually the best kinds of shows to find ordinary looking characters for cosplay. Best examples of this include almost every character in “Black Lagoon” like Revy, Rock, or Benny. Suguru Misato and his teacher Ms. Shikijou from “Mahoromatic” would also fit this category. However, sometimes even bizarre, fantasy set shows can have normal looking characters despite their abnormal settings or sci-fi elements; like Kyon from “Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya” or Sassi and Arumi, both from “Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi.” Always popular with every fan are characters from acclaimed director Hayao Miyazaki, who has made several films with famous characters that are fun to pull off and easy to recognize like Kiki from “Kiki’s Delivery service”, Ponyo and Sosuke from “Ponyo”, or Chihiro from “Spirited Away.

Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

Copyright © 2024 procosplay. All rights reserved.