Cyber Demon Costume Construction (Part ?)

Vinyl, EVA and craft foam, plastic tubing, thermoplastic, polyester fabric, a urethane visor,

 EL wire, LEDs, clear casting resin, and a boatload of hot glue

So, the most recent version of the cyber demon costume debuted at the 2016 Portsmouth Halloween Parade. I finally got around to making a more complete look versus the usual slap on a mask and go technique. Not that it's anywhere near finished, (I have so many eyes to attach) but it's good enough for a nighttime romp. The arm is leftover from two Halloweens ago but matched well enough to be worn. Most people seemed to think I was Predalien, which upon googling now I do bear an uncanny resemblance to which is unintentional (never seen the movie). The body is actually three separate parts: a cropped jacket upper, a corset like middle piece with an attached skirt, and the rib cage which is strapped over the top.

Get ready for some picture spamming.

The visor is hard to photograph accurately - with a flash it seems more transparent, and without it seems more opaque.
It's actually somewhere halfway inbetween the two.

Brain texture details that nobody is ever going to see

More obscure brain details - look how deep it appears to go!

Little tentacles around the mouthpiece 

The shiny skin-like texture of the painted pleather

The mask is built using a clear urethane visor (originally sold for Daft Punk cosplay helmets) as a base, which was tinted using green polyester fabric dye. To make the brain I made a simple paper mache cap which fit under the visor with about an inch of free space. I then coiled up some foam tubing to resemble the wrinkles and folds in the brain and coated the entire thing in layers of glossy Mod Podge, which gave it a wet and gooey look. The outer details are a combination of of EVA and craft foam, the upper jaw being covered in the same vinyl fabric as the jacket. Drilled some holes, added some flickering LED's and my eternal favorite plastic tubing, and molded some teeth using thermoplastic. The mouth is one of those sound reactive mini lightning disks as always.

The tubing on the left side would normally tuck under the fabric to mirror the right, I was just impatient for pictures.

The rib cage was made from two joined pieces of EVA foam. I used a heat gun to warp it to an appropriately curved shape and glued rows of thin rope to the underside for some texture. The top details are bits of craft foam, foam tubing, and more of that plastic tubing cut in half. The eyes are clear resin cast into domes with an eye decal glued on with clear nail polish to the back. I glued EL wire along all the gaps in the rib cage to give it the glow.

Eventually, the spine will have eyeballs in each vertebra to match the ribcage. And probably light up too, we'll see.

The spine is carved foam glued to a fabric base for flexibility as well as durability. It is sewn down directly to the corset and attaches to the upper jacket with some Velcro, which helps hold the entire thing together. The armored plates on the corset are craft foam covered in pleather and painted to look like metal.

This stuff was fun. I saw a tutorial on YouTube about using a heat gun to partially melt synthetic fabrics into this weird bubbly scarred mess and fell in love with the texture immediately. There are some small pieces of this melted fabric around the edge of the mask and neck, but the real display is down the front of the corset piece. The raised areas I highlighted with silver paint to really make the texture pop.

So with three layers of thermals on underneath to combat the frigid cold and a pair of platform boots I was good to go! Expect to see further additions to this costume in the future - like a proper arm and some armored boots.

Happy Halloween 2016!

Happy Halloween 2016! Great times were had at the Portsmouth Halloween Parade as always. I was honored to bring a friend to her first ever Halloween parade experience (I'm the creepy on the left, she's the cute owl on the right). Construction details on the costume coming, stay tuned.

A Little Update...

Haven't posted here in a while. Here's a couple of work in progress photos.

Updated Test Tube Spice Rack

Original post can be found here.

Updates for the test tube spice rack! Originally, I planned to use chalkboard paint on the test tubes for labeling, but the paint does not stick to glass as advertised. So these went without labels until I found out that chalkboard tape is a thing that exists. It does stick to glass, and works wonderfully. Now I need to find other surfaces that could use chalkboard tape enhancements... 

Pencil Practice

A semi-quick (hours rather than days) pencil practice. The eyes are a little less flat and more green in person - something weird happened to the yellow when it was scanned. 

And Another One...

Newest version of the mask. Hopefully the last for a while. It's not completely finished, because I broke the little lightning disk that goes in the mouth. But I'm not going to be able to work on it for a while, and everything else is done so I figured it was time for pictures.

It has a much larger range of vision compared to the other ones.

This one is even lighter, and has crisper details. It's made of paper strips soaked in wood glue, AMACO Sculptamold, some foam and plastic tubing. The visor is clear plexiglass, with a layer of green window cling and a layer of reflective window cling. This way it is both see through and tinted.

The details are a lot sharper in this sculpting material compared to the paper clay.

The teeth are molded thermoplastic, which has the right amount of translucency.

And under the break is another one in my poor quality video series, this one showing how the infinity mirror looks installed in the mask. It's cool to see how the "light tunnel" in the visor moves.

Light Test

A quick (poor quality) teaser of a current project. Some day I will figure out how to make decent quality videos, but today is not that day.

The LEDs are actually flickering, that's not the camera having issues. This illusion is called an infinity mirror. It still needs a bit of cleaning up.