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Adding Real Rust to Armor

This is a quick tutorial about how I use ferrous powder to add real rust to my cosplay armor. I’m using craft foam for the tutorial, but it will work on any base material too. 

Featured cosplayer: theultimatechaser

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I think that in my early 20s I definitely felt like I was getting too old for cosplay, but there were a number of reasons for that I can pinpoint now.

1. If you’re mostly into anime and JRPG, Japanese media has notoriously young casts, so when all the popular characters of the year are barely pushing 16, you start to feel ancient. Getting over that is a) cultivating a level of IDGAF by cosplaying whoever you want regardless of age and b) getting comfortable with more age-appropriate characters.

2. Early 20s is probably also when you’re starting to get bogged down by Adult Responsibilities to the degree where your hobbies take a serious backseat. Most people will have post-secondary, a job, etc. Sometimes when you don’t have time for cosplay, you end up feeling like you just can’t do it anymore at all. Getting over that is about setting goals that are realistic to your schedule. If you want to keep making a lot of costumes per year, you’re probably going to have to take on easier projects or watch your quality nosedive – you’ll have to figure out a new balance to account for your current life, and rejig it whenever necessary. 

3. While not everyone is this fortunate, many young cosplayers have very little expenses (thanks, parents!) and part-time jobs that give them lots of discretionary spending money. You’re also lower skill, so you don’t spend as much time making high-quality costumes, so it’s easy to make 3-4 new costumes for every convention. I bet a lot of us have costuming histories that look like this:

 high school: way too many crap costumes for various material costs

university: far fewer but better quality costumes for reasonable material costs

working: few costumes with more expensive material costs

Going from high school to university can be a shocker, too. When you go from making 9-12 costumes a year to making 2-3, you can sometimes feel like you might as well quit…. especially when the finance issues most people encounter in university make it feel like you have to choose cosplay over eating or whatever. Cut back and make do until you’re out of the early formative years of your adulthood – cosplay can wait, and it’ll still welcome you as an adult.

4. Take a break. You might just feel old because you’re getting burned out – churning out content constantly for years can exhaust you, and if you feel “i’m too old” rather than “i don’t want to anymore”, odds are the issue is you feel you can’t keep up with the community, rather than there being actual any problem with you. Take a break! I take 3-4 months off cosplay every fall when I used to work year-round. It keeps me sane now.

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Get Off My Lawn, You Durn Whippersnappers!

Sorry, folks, but I’m going to soapbox for a bit here.

(But first, let me say that the previous responses to the original post are excellent. My own experience is somewhat different – more on that later – but everything Jenn said above is good advice!)

Now, back to the OP. I see this topic come up far, FAR too often in the cosplay community. From an admin on a cosplay forum who shut down a thread for older cosplayers, saying, “I’m 19, so I understand what it’s like to be older than all the other cosplayers out there,” to being told to my face, “People over 30 who cosplay are just creepy,” there seems to be a lot of teenage prejudice against adults participating in what they perceive as their hobby.

But here’s the thing – cosplay has never been the exclusive domain of the young. From its inception, fan costuming was an adult phenomenon, and it’s only in the last couple of decades (and primarily in anime fandom) that the median age has dropped toward the teen range.

First off, a little history. Cosplay is not a recent phenomenon. Though people have enjoyed dressing up as fictional characters for hundreds of years, “modern” fan costuming dates back to the turn of the last century. Here’s a science-fiction contest winner from 1910:

This was three decades before Forrest J. Ackerman’s “futuristicostume,” often cited as the first hall costume worn at a convention. Ackerman and his friend Myrtle Douglas dressed up for the World Science Fiction Convention in 1939:

Even the word “cosplay” itself, coined by Japanese guest Takahashi Nobuyuki to describe the fan costuming he saw at WorldCon, dates back to 1984. (That’s 32 years ago, if you’re playing along at home.)

We have this massive heritage of fan events and fan costuming, with roots stretching back over a century, and its development has been surprisingly well documented via fanzines, personal photos, and news articles. If you look at any retrospective of fan conventions through the 20th century, you’ll see that the majority of attendees (including those in costume) were adults. Sure, some parents brought their kids along – some even dressed in matching costumes (1965, source, nudity warning) – but these events were clearly intended primarily as grown-up entertainment, punctuated with cocktail parties and awards ceremonies.

The age range widened toward the upper end as years passed and returning attendees aged. By mid-century, there seem to have been as many convention attendees in their forties and fifties as there were in their twenties. (A few gallery links below, if you want to see for yourself.)

1957 WorldCon

1961 LXICON

1965 WorldCon Masquerade

1970 SciCon

These individuals didn’t stop wearing costumes because they had reached some arbitrary age where society dictates that you have to stop dressing up – in fact, some of them continued attending those cons in costume for decades. More than once I’ve met an older fan at a con, commented on his or her costume, and then had that person pull out a pocket album of photos and proudly show me the costumes they wore in the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s.

I lay all this out only to show that there is plenty of precedent for people of all ages participating in fandom at every level, including dressing up in costume.

I was around 20 when I discovered fan conventions (Star Wars Celebration, yo), and at that time most of the people I saw at those events seemed to be older than I was. It wasn’t until I started attending more anime conventions in the mid-’00s that I began seeing events with more teenagers than adults. I chalked this up to a difference in demographic – anime cons seemed to attract more attendees in the high school and college bracket, those who (at that time) had grown up watching the anime-influenced cartoons of the 1980s, while science-fiction events drew a slightly older audience, those who had been fans of Star Trek and Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica in their original runs. Each type of convention had a different median age, but it wasn’t that either group was too old or too young to be going to cons; each age group just had slightly different fandom inclinations, based on their experiences.

So the assertion that it’s not appropriate for someone to cosplay past age ___ , some number based on the average age of cosplayers in their particular fandom, is just as ridiculous as someone stating that it’s inappropriate for a person to cosplay if they’re not at least ___ years old, because that’s the age group of their particular fandom. It’s a contrived and artificial limitation.

Full disclosure: Unlike most of the people who suggest that cosplay has an upper age limit, I never cosplayed as a teenager. I was 21 when I cobbled together my first costume for a convention. It wasn’t until several years later that I actually learned to sew and began making my own costumes for competition (I’ve shared that story previously). But though my own experience may be different than someone who started cosplaying when they were still in grade school, it doesn’t change the fact that there is nothing wrong with cosplaying as an adult. There is simply no such thing as too old (or too young, or too anything) to cosplay.

I am 34 at the time of this writing, and I am the YOUNGEST member of my cosplay group. Some of the most popular “celebrity cosplayers” are also in their thirties (Yaya Han, Ginny McQueen, Victoria “ScruffyRebel” Schmidt, et al.). I know several amazing cosplayers who started cosplaying later in life than I did, and many, many older ones who are still active in the community. Some of them are now in their fifties and sixties, but they’re still dressing up and running events at cons and even participating in masquerades, because they enjoy doing it.

And here’s a kernel from my own experience: The older I get, the more opportunities I have to make and enjoy great costumes. Frankly, I never could have afforded the time or materials to make really elaborate or complex costumes when I was a full-time student, but as An Adult™ I have more control over my schedule, and my finances are more flexible. How sad it would be if I’d stopped cosplaying at 24, with only a few mediocre costumes under my belt, because someone suggested I was “getting too old to cosplay,” rather than going on to make some of my best projects! (Not to mention all the seminars and workshops I wouldn’t be teaching now…)

So, no, OP, you’re not too old to cosplay. You may be tired of cosplaying, or you may be too busy to make something, or you may have other priorities – finding a job or buying a house or starting a family or going to grad school or pursuing a different hobby. And if you want to do something like that instead of cosplaying, that is just fine, so long as it’s your own decision.

Valkyrie eeves

Tokyo Ghoul cosplayer collection

Queen of Hearts: Sakizou! I finally have a full frontal pic ready! This gown broke me and my wallet. I’m going to take a hiatus from making myself massive gowns for a while….I think I’m switching back to armor or vinyl as a nice change of pace! 18 yards of deep crimson velvet, 14 yards of champagne satin, 16 kinds of trim/lace trim/beaded trim (a lot of them I made myself), 15 kinds of beads and cabochons (many of which I hand painted), the wig is 2 wigs wefted together and curled permanently with glues…sadly the hat covers so much of that work. The staff is wood and the spiral part is clay, the heart at the top I hand carved from foam and covered in stretch velvet, and the ruffles in the collar are lightly wired in a few ways to keep it’s shape and standing up, though I did make some adjustments after this first wear (as you have to :/ ). It doesn’t take very long to put on, I made it so the gown is actually just 3 pieces, not including the hoop skirt and collar, so it’s easy to get in and out of for the most part. But it’s WARM, so this will probably be a winter costume, wearing this in the summer is going to cause passing out (and that’s fun!). Photo taken by Robby Idol Cosplay !

Thigh High Trick Tutorial 

Cata: Finally figured out how to attach the arm plates to the chain mail without any visible strapping. There’s paracord and velcro and duct tape on the inside of the armor woven into the chain mail.