In July I was tasked with creating a cosplay of a character from the MMO Dungeon Fighter Online! I've compiled some work in progress photos and notes about the process here on my blog. Read on for the deets!
Concept Art:
The Slayer design has a bolero style fur coat with a very fluffy collar. Re-creating the fabric parts was the first task I tackled on this costume, knocking out the pattern and mockup in an evening. The body of the bolero is made of black faux fur and the collar is made of ostrich feathers. The lining is a crimson stretch cotton sateen. The dress is fleece lined spandex.
Some dislike working with faux fur because it is messy and can look bad if not cut right. As long as you know a few tricks beforehand it is one of the easier materials to cross your crafting table. I've put together a few tips on working with fake fur here:
I hit several big road blocks while working on this costume. One of the issues I encountered was several molds I was making for parts of the belt failed. I had to change tactics fast, since I only had a few weeks to construct everything. Thankfully, my cosplaying partner in crime, Kevin had the idea of using a rubber toilet gasket as a shape to mold Worbla over. A part of my brain thought, "Are you really going to use parts of a toilet to make this costume?" I did. No regrets. 🚽
Creating the sword and sheath was the biggest hurdle when making this costume due to time constraints. I opted to make them out of Worbla because it required only a few tools and less time than other materials. Kevin’s idea of using plumbing parts was useful yet again. The hand guard’s round shape is made of large gaskets cut and covered in Worbla.
The blade is reinforced with a metal rod to give it rigidity. Most of the time spent on the props was dedicated to things like sanding wood putty and painting, which ended up being a real challenge as thunderstorms rolled in and my house had to get a new roof. (My sewing room had buckets of water pouring into it the first night of the storms...) Normally, I'd have shelved the project until I had freedom to prep & paint outside, but the clock was ticking down. I prepped, primed, and painted mostly at night when construction wasn't going on.
For the gems on the belt, boots, and gloves I created a marble texture in the color I needed in photoshop. I printed it out on photo paper and programmed my digital cutter create the circle sizes I needed.
I gave my digital cutter a more ambitious job later, which was making the lace for the costumes garters out of iron on gold vinyl. I could have saved time by using generic gold lace for this detail, but for some reason I decided to give in to the masochism of wanting the lace to be accurate to the concept art. I carefully traced the lace design from the concept art and created a file my digital cutter could use to cut out strips of the iron on vinyl. Even though the cutter did a good job, there were still a lot of pieces that needed to be punched out by hand. The vinyl ironed on with a press cloth and some more patience.
The thigh highs I wore with the complete costume are actually tights made to look like thigh highs. The Slayer's thigh highs look practically painted on in the concept art, so regular thigh highs didn't give me the effect I wanted. Good thing fake thigh high tights are something you can get from Amazon Prime these days! The boots I used started out life as above the knee boots that got a drastic trim before the details were added on.
I made the crescent moons for the necklace by gluing together charms I cut up. The earrings are made from tassels covered in Worbla and studded trim. I used the same trim in numerous places on the costume. While it is slightly different from the concept art, it was a change I decided to make to tie small details of the costume together. The wig I'm wearing is a Stevie Classic in Silver from Arda Wigs.
The end results:
Big thanks to the team at DFO for reaching out to me about creating this project! They sent along a bunch of DFO goodies, including some very cute figures of the different variants of the Slayer class!
Dungeon Fighter Online is available to play on Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/495910/ Quite a few of the characters designs appealed to the cosplayer in me. Ultimately, I liked the strong and noble look of the Female Slayer the most but the Knight is really cute! Maybe you'll like the Slayer class too, or maybe another type will have your name on it. Check it out! Thanks for reading! ⚔ Maridah ⚔
Post Update:
This post has been relocated in its original form to my new website hosting in January 2021. Previous comments on the post were not migrated.