How to make your own Widow's Bites
Black Widow’s awesome utility bracelet things.
So! Step one
Now, before you do anything, wash the hell out of them. Use dish soap. These things are greasy.
Lay the bullet strips out flat on cardboard. Spray. Let it dry for a good hour. Flip. Spray. Wait an hour. Repeat until you achieve the desired opacity.
Ta da! Easy. Accurate. Awesome.
Thanks to my lovely model, Dartoftruth.
Ahoges. The informative post.
Since SpacePirateRose asked me about them, I shall explain!
First, there are really three ways to style an ahoge:
The braiding method - Basically you have a piece of wire, and you take a small amount of wig fiber, and just braid it over the wire.
CosplayFu’s Italy wig would be an example of this method.
The downside is that it looks fairly strange. .__. And not like an actual part of the character’s hair.
The tease and spike method- So this one is a bit more common. You take a small section of wig fiber, tease the bottom, then spike/style into the shape you want.
The issue with this method, I found, was that the ahoge never really stayed up. It flopped everywhere. This video shows you how to do that method.
As you can see, the ahoge really is just standing up, and isn’t very rigid. Perhaps for Canada, but most certainly not for Italy or Austria.
Also! You may need a fair amount of wig fiber depending on the ahoge. This risks exposing wefts, and photographs where you see the top of the wig look weird. xD
The covered wire method- Aaaaaand this is the one I use. There are a couple tutorials already out there on this.
Most notably this one.
I’ve actually never used an actual weft for my ahoges. 75% of the time I order from Arda-Wigs and they don’t sell wefts, you have to harvest them from ponytail clip-ons. So I make sure to get a wig quite a bit longer than the style it will be cut into, save the sections I trim off, and use that for my ahoge. You may have an issue with getting such small sections of wig fiber to adhere to the wire. So I just use super glue. 8D
Make sure the sections you are glueing on are at least an inch and a half long though. You may get some stray hairs that won’t follow the curve of the wire, just trim them off. c:
I did TimelordTango’s Chibitalia wig with this method:
So yeah, broski. If this wasn’t very helpful, then I have some wigfiber and wire that I could do an actual tutorial with. owo Don’t be afraid to ask questiooooooons~
Random cosplay skit tip
I love silent movies, and something that I find myself taking away from these movies is how to portray a character or character type without saying a word. How to exaggerate your actions without looking silly. So, if you ever find yourself looking for tips on how to express yourself on stage without words… silent movies are a good resource.
Some good movies are The Thief of Bagdad 1924; The Iron Horse 1924; The Patsy 1928; and Nosferatu 1922
And hey, these are all amazing movies so I recommend watching them all anyway.
your iron man hand looks really great! i like that it looks kind of feminine too. how did you make it?
Thanks! Keeping the hand and fingers slim was really important to me, first of all because the Iron Man suit itself is pretty slim around the hands, and secondly, the slimmer the fit, the more dexterity you have. Also, I wanted the repulsors to light up, but not stick really far out. I guess the end result makes for sleek look. A lot of people use thick craft foam for the suit, which makes it look really clunky, but I use different materials for different parts to make it appropriately solid or slim. For instance, the fingers are just cardstock with a layer of masking tape and some elmers glue, the palm of my hand is thin craft foam with plasti-dip, and the upper gauntlets are resin-coated thick craft foam.
I’ve kept a decent record of the process. This is my repulsor setup. Coating the edges in plasti-dip ended up working great to cover up the light leaks. Here are the fingers. I ended up going with a few layers of white glue on top of cardstock covered in masking tape to give them a smooth, thin, paintable surface. The template I had was much bigger than my hand, so there was a lot of time I went through and made sure each piece was cut down and fitted properly. These are the hands. I also simplified the template for these, since my hands are small. I glued thin craft foam to some gorilla-grip gloves I got at Home Depot with E6000 glue along with the center repulsor (with the wires strung inside). I also glued the top piece of each finger, that way I can pull them on and off without assembling a bunch, and can wear them without flinging fingertips all over the place. To finish it, I maksed off the repulsor with painters tape, then covered it in spray plasti-dip. I had to spray paint the whole hands chrome first (for a shiny undercoat), then with red auto paint (it is a bit translucent, so it hardly shows up on matte black).
This is where I got the templates for this costume. It takes some fitting to get them to sit right, but it totally cuts down on the amount of trial and error. I’ll be blogging my progress on developing the rest of the suit if you track the tag “liz becomes Tony Stark”. Cheers! :D
zeldaavianamerican replied to your post: ankoku-jin replied to your post: Now eating…
paperclay molds well onto tin foil, and using an intermediate layer of paper can also help adhere paperclay to other stuff. I used it for the entirety of my Cardcaptor Sakura staff and it went over nicely!
Oh, good to know! Thanks for the tip! :D
