Team Awesome

And finally here’s the spam of The Clone Wars realness I promised! Photos are by Kyuu Eturautti if not credited otherwise in photo itself. 

In the last photo we have all the competition winners. :) 

Amirattus cosplay as Toriel. 

MiiCosplay  as Piña Co Lada

Bigby Wolf @ Popcult 2017 by Alex from Team Awesome

Soooooo, we have very happy and incredible news for you guys! We placed 2nd in Popcult’s cosplay contest. I’m still kind of stunned and just wrapping my brain around it, but yeah, this actually happened. Here are our finished The Clone Wars cosplays and I’m so proud to finally show them to you guys. These are our probably best costumes yet as far as I can say. :) This gorgeous photo of us above was snapped by talented Kyuu Eturautti. 

Here’s our tired (me) and smirking (Alex) faces after the competition. We want to thank every single one of our friends and followers who came to see the competition and cheer for us! ♥ Now we’re tired and happy and probably taking a couple weeks break from anything cosplay-related before we’re going to dig few old Kingdom Hearts costumes from the closet and see how to fix them up a bit.   

So, here’s our lineup for Popcult. On Saturday I’ll be wearing Daenerys Targaryen cosplay from the Game of Thrones TV series and Alex will be rocking his Bigby cosplay (we literally pulled together in a week because we apparently had so much free time, huh...) from the video game Wolf Among Us. 

And on Sunday it’s the day for the cosplay contest and we’ll finally be wearing The Clone Wars Anakin and Obi-Wan. I’m pretty excited and very proud of us for finally finishing these. Still some tiny details to fix before the con, but we are going to look pretty good when it’s all done! 

We’re going to do something we haven’t done before and that it taking part in cosplay competition. This is happening in Popcult and we’ve worked like crazy with our The Clone Wars outfits to get everything ready in time.

It’s been a long and wild ride, but now we’re only missing styling of the wigs and paint from Obi-Wan’s armor plus some minor details. And we still have a week till convention. I’m very proud of us! :) And now I’m gonna drop here a bunch of WIP photos from recent development.

The contest is held on Sunday, be sure to head up there if you’re coming to the con! 

Here we have Obi-Wan’s armor parts in various stages of the process. We used black worbla on these armors and I can warmly recommend the black one, it’s a lot easier to work with.

Sanding does make a huge difference!

Jedi logo prints for the shoulder armors.

Finally my shoes. They have been hands down the most difficult part of this whole damn cosplay. I covered my sneakers with craft foam to get the base shoes done and it was nice and easy, but the leg of the boot... Well. It’s a separate “armor” as well, and I’ve had my fair share of problems with it. It’s made from cellular plastic (not sure about the term in English, but this is what translating machine tells me) and covered with fake leather and then painted and clued together. It wasn’t exactly easy to make these fit my legs right and it took me day or two to get them bend from right places and be long enough. 

One problem we had was that in cartoon style there’s no seams in anything, but it was impossible to get the boot of the leg in the shape I wanted AND be able to slip it on. So, it opens from the back. As far as I’m concerned I think I did pretty well with covering up the part where it opens. Luckily actually making the vertical slips separately and gluing them to place helps a lot in hiding things. 

Here’s some details of your Organization XIII cosplays. Here’s Zexion’s weapon, Lexicon. I was lucky enough to find a jewelery box in a shape of a book, so I had just to cover it with soft foam and craft the details - this turned out to be a lot more work than I firstly thought. I’m pretty proud of how it turned out. :)

Here are the things dangling from the cloak. I don’t know the correct words in English, but you get the idea. These were very plain and simple so he re-made them again and I’m pretty happy with these as well. 

Here’s some hair magic by Alex. He had to sew some more hair in the front of the Xemnas’ wig and it turned out very great. We also had to sew more hair to both of the wigs so it would be possible to make the spikes.   

Zexion part. 1.

Zexion part. 2. He had idiotic hair, just look at the references. Also I have no ducking idea what color it is because it varies from game to game. So, we just went with the color this wig was available with. *shrug* 

As I said earlier the coats were already done, so we had to just fix them a little (Axel and Roxas were our second cosplays together). Here we have the prior and after pics. I have no idea why we had decided to leave the left-over INSIDE OF THE CLOAK??? But okay, it’s fixed now. :D  

Here’s bunch of photos of our Organization XIII group we had at Yukicon 4 February 2017. We already had the cloaks, so we “just” had to style the wigs, get contact lenses and I had to make myself Lexicon. Alex did once again amazing job with these spiky wigs! I’m very happy about our group and it was very cool to almost have the whole Organization (we’re only short three members).

We had so much fun at the con with these people! Thank you very much guys ♥ 

Axel and Saïx: Ivanneth Cosplay

Demyx: Nippura Cosplay

Roxas: Aldean Cosplay

Cosplay plans for 2017

Here we have our plans for this year. We’re kicking the year off with Kingdom Hearts Organization XIII group cosplay with Ivanneth Cosplay, Aldean Cosplay, Nippura Cosplay and Tillin Tallon Tömpsis Cosplay. Alex is doing Xemnas and I’m doing Zexion. We already have our jackets, so this is mostly fixing a bit and doing our wigs and props kinda cosplay. 

Next is Popcult and Clone Wars Anakin and Obi-Wan. Because yeah, we have problems with needing to do several versions of the same characters. We’re participating in pair cosplay contest in Popcult with these ones, so after postponing them for few conventions this is ultimate deadline. We’ve already started, but there’s still a lot armor stuff ahead. (stay tuned, there will be wips)

Happy New Year 2017! 

Here we have all our cosplays worn in 2016. We only did 2 new ones each; PE teacher!Dean and Leviathan!Castiel from Supernatural and Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi from Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith.

We did GoT cosplays in 2015 but we wore them again this year in few conventions as well. We had a photoshoot with Ivanneth Cosplay and got some real nice photos of Alex’s Jon ja Em’s Ygritte! ♥ I also really like the photos Alex snapped from my Dany cosplay in front of the red wall, I really love the contrast! 

In Popcult we had a presentation about spirits and ghouls used in Supernatural and of course we were dressed a accordingly in Supernatural cosplays. For such easy looking cosplays these were actually pretty hard to make! I really loved to play with the fake blood. The presentation went well. Fun fact: this was the 5th version of Dean for Alex and 4th version of Castiel for me. It was also the third trench coat for me...

Main project of 2016 was Star Wars and again we had a joy to do them with bunch of good friends. Anakin and Obi-Wan were our very first cosplays in 2010, so it was very rewarding to do them again. We could very well see where we had improved and how. they were a lot comfier to wear this time and I’m really proud of how everything turned out. 

Hi guys and sorry again, it’s been ages. To my defense, it’s been a long autum and this month I’ve been doing Nanowrimo. But we have managed to squeeze in some Clone Wars -cosplay making as well. Unfortunately these will not be ready for this years HothCon, but now we’re set to get them done by Yukicon 2017. And maybe we’ll wear them next years HothCon, who knows! ;)

These are our first armor cosplays and making the armor took more time than anticipated and we just don’t want to rush it. There’s not really hurry, we’ll do there when we have time because we want to do them well.  

Here we have Alex working his magic with the patterns. He’s responsible for Anakin’s chest armor and it looks amazing so far! Now we need to top this with black worbla, top that with gesso and paint it. We brought the black worbla for the first time and it’s a lot easier to work with than the regular one so we’ll be looking forward to that turning out well. :)

Photo of Anakin’s chest armor from both sides.

Meanwhile I did the armor pads for shoulders. It’s still a bit mystery how we’re going to make these stay on us - probably we’ll sew them to the sleeves?

Aaaand I got started with Obi-Wan’s gloves, his hand armors and pouches for our belts. There’s still a lot to be done, but I’m confident we’ll tackle it all just fine. :)

ALSO important news! Alex is taking part in HothCon’s cosplay competition with his Obi-Wan Kenobi -cosplay. It’s a single person contest and he’s been talking about taking part in one for a while and this felt like a small and comfy con to try it out. He’s been working very hard to fix small things in his outfit and it looks damn great. :3 If you’re coming to HothCon be sure to come and see the cosplay competition Saturday at 3 pm! 

Here’s a few photos of his Obi-Wan cosplay to freshen up your mental images of him rocking it. ;) But yeah, I’m really proud of him and I hope it’s a good competition and nice judges and he gets a nice experience from it.

Have you guys ever wondered how much you may have improved and learned about various (cosplay-related things) over the years? Have you ever compared your previous work with the more recent one and thought; yeah, maybe I did it better this time? Well, for us this is slightly easier because this year (like crazy people we are) we remade our very first cosplays, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker, and now we have very literal proof of how much we have learned over the years. :D Check out these photos:

Left photos are from 2010 and right ones from 2016. I still remember how ridiculously proud of our costumes I was back at the 2010 when we finally finished them! We did the best we could what we knew at the time. I’m still quite proud of the costumes, to be honest. It’s where we started at. :) It was a lot of effort and work back then. An quite honestly I really didn’t realize how big the difference of these cosplays were until I saw all these pictures paired up together like this.

All of this has taken years of time and hours of work. Nowadays I also spend a lot more money on cosplay. I spend a lot more time too. Over the years I’ve learned to sew a beard, craft your own shoes and belts, work with materials like worbla, gesso and eva foam. Alex knows how to make patterns now and he does our patterns and the leather work. This hobby has definitely made me a better learner and a better at solving unexpected problems. These all are things we’ve learned bit by bit and it’s not easy to see it along the way how much you’ve learned in total - unless you have this kind of comparative pictures. It’s good to stop and think about this progress once in a while.

So, you know, guys. This isn’t just us, this is probably everyone I’ve ever known. If you put your mind on something and if you keep doing it, keep making mistakes and learning, you can achieve great many things. May it be a better cosplay outfits in the future, maybe something entirely else. My point is; don’t be too hard on yourself. Your first cosplay doesn’t have to be perfect. It’s the best you can do right now. And that’s more than enough. :)

Here we have it! Our Star Wars cosplays are almost finished and I couldn’t be more happy or proud of us. :) We’re missing only straps from Anakin’s boots and Obi-Wan’s beard and we’re good to go!

The last thing we finished yesterday were the belts. I’m extremely happy with the worbla work I did and just look at those leather pouches Alex made for us - they’re just right size for our phones to fit in there nicely. The belts are about 100x better than 6 years ago in our first versions of these guys. The best part of re-doing these cosplays is to see how much you have learned over the years and how much more creative you are at coming up with alternative solutions. 

Sorry for taking this long to answer!  We’we been busy finishing our cosplays. We’d love to do some kind of tutorial when we have time. :) We can post pictures of the patterns we used and separately of each layer we’re wearing.