#splatoon cosplay tutorial

The whole wig is made out of 1/4″ sheets of L200 foam. I use Barge contact cement (mixed with Barge thinner) to glue foam together. Once the wig is glued together I used DAP Weldwood contact cement to seal it before painting. And it was painted with plain ol’ acrylics! 

Here’s the pattern:

The wig is basically made up of two parts: the helmet/headpiece which is made with pattern pieces A and B, and then the four tentacles (pieces C through I) that are basically glued right onto the helmet. I used this pattern from Evil Ted as a starting point for the helmet, by the way; check his site out for lots of really useful foam patterns! 

So you’ll want to make the helmet and then the four tentacles (two front and two back) separately before gluing them all together. Here’s sort of a color code guide to what edges glue onto what:

And here’s how the pieces all fit together on the final wig:

I recommend cutting your pattern pieces out of paper and taping the whole thing together first to get an idea of how everything fits, before you cut pieces out of foam. I probably made 3 or 4 paper mock ups before cutting out my foam. 

Now there are a few issues I have with this wig, so if you use this pattern as a starting point, maybe you’ll figure out ways to fix them! First of all, you can probably tell that there are a few places where the wig doesn’t cover my hair all the way (over the ear, in the back, etc). I recommend... thoroughly working out all the fit issues in your paper mock-up, and not getting impatient like I did. xD

 Another problem I ran into is that... basically, my head is a lot smaller than an inkling’s head, and I couldn’t fit in the two small stubby tentacles on the back of the head:

like those. I kind of ended up making an artistic decision to just leave them off and maintain the general silhouette that I liked, but you could definitely mess with the sizes of the tentacles in my pattern to come up with another solution. Oh, I also never put suckers on the tentacles! That’s an easy fix though: just cut some circles out of your foam and slap em on.