Akasha cosplay skirt (part 1 - drilling shells)

Drilling the pieces for Akasha's skirt

So I bought myself a drill press thanks to this piece of the costume.  Akasha's skirt (the part below the belt) appears to be made of square bits of shell (possibly abalone) with 2 tarnished gold loops connecting the pieces vertically and 1 horizontally.  Ayla was kind enough to supply the shell bits as well as most of the jewelry for the rest of her cosplay costume.  Thankfully her belly-dancing allowed her to recognize the jewelry pieces in the original.  That being said, I'm using smaller shell pieces than the original costume so I'm going 1 metal link in each direction and more of them (mine are not even 1"x1", the original Akasha costume appears to be 2-3" squared).  To make the correct width and length it's going to take around 10 piece wide by 20 pieces long.  That means 200 pieces, almost 800 holes, and 400 metal rings 0.o.  I trying to use the handheld drill for this, but whatever the pieces are made of is tougher than it looks.  I ended up breaking 3 drill bits in the first hour and only got 15 pieces drilled.  After buying a drill press add-on for my rotary tool I was able to finished the rest of the pieces in around 3 hours.  BTW, if you ever want to drill something like this WEAR A MASK.  I'm not 100% certain the pieces are actual shell, but in general the dust from seashells in toxic (in the sense that it is like glass dust and can shred your lungs).  You can see in the picture how much dust is made.  It's too bad I can't start on the next part for a while, I think the skirt is off to a good start.  First I need the 800 rings to come in, which could be a week or 2, and the wire for the headpiece is also in that order.  I may work on creating the seashell looking pieces for the crown (the big pieces that stick out) while I wait, or go back to making some dice jewlery.

~Glitterforge Phoenix

Akasha cosplay bra (final)

Akasha cosplay bra (finished)

And here is where it all came together.  For the final part of the bra for the Akasha cosplay I did a layer of pearlescent purple paint, thinly sprayed using the airbrush (small amount of paint from the tip with a larger amount of air and distance).  I did this to get a very even dispersal of paint while leaving the silver color present.  In the above image you can see a bit of the purple shine in the upper left, but the effect is more pronounced without a camera flash.

Akasha cosplay bra (finished) - purple shine

Unfortunately, I am not great at holding a steady camera and have never found a reason for a tripod.  The above picture shows off the purple effect a bit better, even if it is a little blurry.  I may use a brush to add a little bit of shadow (using watered down black) to the low areas, but that will be a very minor touch.  I may also just leave it as-is since I'm content with how it looks.  The next part of the costume will be working on the skirt, which uses a combination of shells, chain, and bits of Turkamon jewlery.

~Glitterforge Phoenix

Akasha cosplay bra (part 5)

Akasha cosplay bra with first coat of silver

The silver layer is where having an airbrush came in handy.  Not only am I not leaving brush marks, but I can do the fine edge that boarders the gold with very little over-spray.  I used the 80%/20% paint/water mix that I found out when working with the gold and it covered much better and was less runny when working in the more detailed areas.  Even with good covering paint you still need multiple coats go get a good product though.  This is true for just about any project.

Akasha cosplay bra with final coat of silver

 Here is the bra finished with silver.  It's already starting to really come together , but there is a final step to painting it that is really my finishing touch on this piece of the costume.  If you look carefully, the pictures of the costume in the movie vary from looking silver around the edges to looking purple.  I believe the bra was painted to replicate an iridescent seashell effect, and I'm hoping to achieve the same thing for this cosplay.  First, I had to let the silver dry completely before adding the final layer.

~Glitterforge Phoenix

Akasha cosplay bra (part 4)

Akasha cosplay bra after 3 layers of gold paint

This is my first time working with an airbrush in years, and the paint I bought was not actually airbrush paint.  While the metallic gold is pretty easy to find, the pearlescent purple needed later wasn't.  I picked up a regular acrylic pack that had a good mix of metallics and pearlescent paints and decided to thin them down to work in the airbrush.  Since they are water based I just mixed some water in the airbrush container with the paint.  I started at 50/50 since the paint seemed thick, but as you can see it didn't coat very well even after 3 layers.

Akasha cosplay bra after last gold layer

The end result was having to do a lot of layers.  I lost count, but I think the final total was around 8 layers.  For the final 2 coats I made a much thicker mix (around 80% paint I think) and it was spraying okay even with the finest tip of the airbrush.  At this point I let it dry for 8 hours before moving on to silver.

~Glitterforge Phoenix

Akasha cosplay bra (part 3)

Akasha cosplay bra post rotary tool

This is what the bra for the Akasha cosplay looks like after a couple hours of grinding with a rotary tool.  Everything, even the raised areas and edges, was smoothed using a "finishing abrasive buff" tip.  That's fancy talk for what is basically the back side of those kitchen sponges.  Using this bit was what I came to after trying sanding drums, sanding discs, and grinding bits. The abrasive buff bit was the only one that would sand the plastic without causing the plastic to make little burrs all over the surface (I think the other bits caused the plastic to get too warm and basically the sanded dust melted back down and clumped).  Also, you have to rely almost solely on touch for the lower areas because the white on white made it impossible to see what was smooth and what wasn't.  The final touch was using a combination of a small cone shaped grinding stone bit and engraving bit to carve out some of the small pits on the outside edge and the tiny low areas in the pointy bits and center curve.  Once everything was done I gave it a good wash and let it dry.  Next step is painting it.

~Glitterforge Phoenix

Akasha cosplay bra (part 2)

Akasha cosplay full bra (after making second cup)

And here is the full bra.  It only took another 2 hours to make the second cup since I now had some better ideas of how to work with the plastic. That being said, I probably spent a third hour messing around trying to make them both even (which is hard when if you look at the source images of Akasha you will notice her right side is bigger and slightly different from the left, presumably due to anatomy).  I'm happy with the overall results and feel this is one of the most accurate replicas of the bra I've seen for cosplay, despite my very limited experience doing crafts.  The next stage will be using a rotary tool to smooth out curves, eliminate bumps/fingerprints, and cut into some of the small areas that need grooves.  Below is an image with the lines I drew on the bra to give myself a guide for the next step.

Akasha cosplay bra - preparation for rotary tool

I'll put up a post soon with what it looks like after some serious work smoothing it out and putting some of the more detailed grooves in.

~Glitterforge Phoenix

Akasha cosplay bra (part 1)

First part of the Akasha cosplay bra made with modable plastic

So here is the first part of my attempt at making the Akasha's bra from the Queen of the Damned movie.  Moldable plastic is this cool material I ordered from the internet.  Basically it's hard plastic at room temperature, but if you heat it to 140 degrees or higher it gets the consistency somewhere between clay and those really gummy erasers.  I used a craft store purchasable bra as a backing and then molded the shaped the warm plastic onto the bra.  This took a couple attempts and my conclusion is that the 140 degree water that the container told me to use was only to make the product more "kid safe".  Really heating the water to about 170 degrees was ideal for getting the plastic fully melted (it's clear when melted and white when cooled).  It stays workable for a few minutes, so I did some of the detail work during that time, but there just wasn't enough.  Rather than remelting the entire thing and trying again, I pulled out a hair dryer and heated up specific sections until they became transparent.  I then continued to work it like clay, creating the ridges and curves for the bra.  Overall it took around 4 hours of work to make the first cup.  The materials were pretty nice to work with once I started using the hairdryer to heat it and seems to work well for creating cosplay items since the texture is much smoother than clay.

~Glitterforge Phoenix

Basic dice earrings

You'd be surprised how many dice you can split when trying to make earrings.  Murphy's law states that whenever you need a matched pair of dice, the second one you drill will always split if you don't have a replacement.  So I decided to make the dice earrings out of d10's and d8's.  Translucent d4's will also be okay, but I currently have a 50/50 chance of splitting a d4 if it is speckled and a 25% chance of splitting it even if it's translucent.  Maybe I'll give the small ones another chance if I get a drill press.  I also avoid d20's for earrings because they are so heavy.  If anyone has a source for mini d20's please let me know, because I'd love to use them instead.  So the earrings on the left use a matching pair of d8's, drilled all the way through with a headpin and beads on each side.  The loop on top is then attached to a jump ring which is attached to the earring itself.  The ones on the right are the same general idea but with 3 small lengths of chain attached to a loop on the headpin on the bottom.  I really like the effect this gives, but it is a little more difficult to make.  Cutting 6 even lengths of chain is easy, but trying to hold the beads on the headpin is more annoying (especially with poor quality tools that twist when working).  These will also be something I'm likely making bunches of.  I do have to find a cheap way to get pairs of dice though.  My local hobby store tends to make up for a small loss in the price of d20's by jacking up the price of the smaller polyhedral dice, and the availability of bulk online ordering will depend on how much everyone likes what I make.  This is the last of the dice jewelry for a little bit since I'm going to start serious work an Akasha cosplay for Ayla Almee.  The costume should be interesting for anyone who wants to see a lot of media mixed (resin, moldable plastic, airbrushing, jewelry, chain, wire, etc).

~Glitterforge Phoenix

My simple D20 necklaces

Here are the two basic dice necklaces I plan to eventually make a bunch of in as many colors as I can find dice.  The one on the left is a single chain with a single die on it (drilled all the way through as usual).  The one on the right uses an additional piece of chain for a dangle.  One improvement I've made is using a jump ring to attach the looped headpin to the chain.  While this doesn't change much cosmetically in the necklaces, it makes the creation process easier because you can make the loop on the headpin tighter.  I've also found some important things out about the dice.  If you try to drill polyhedral dice, you quickly find out that the materials are not all the same.  Speckled dice tend to be made out of multiple materials and mostly rubber (the spots and solid color are separate materials), and translucent dice tend to be made out of pure resin or plastic.  What this means when drilling is that the speckled ones tend to split because they have all those different lumps in them (not so much on d20's, but a d4 that is speckled is a nightmare).  On the other hand, the translucent ones tend to melt a little bit when drilling.  If you stop the drill the bit will get stuck (permanently), they will sometimes reseal the hole if you don't put the head pin in immediately, and you have to chip the plastic stuff off the bit after every one you drill.  Finally, if you take a sharp knife and flatten out one of the points of the die you have an easier time getting the drilling started.

~Glitterforge Phoenix

Triforce - Second Draft

Triforce Necklace - Second Draft (with d10's!)

So here is the second draft of the Triforce necklace.  I went back to the big box craft store and got another spool of curb chain.  In the store lighting it looked more gold, but I noticed it is more of a copper appearance once I got it home.  As usual the store doesn't label what it is made out of.  I also had to get new findings to match (although those actually appear gold).  I also ordered a bulk mixed bag of dice for future projects.  The selection wasn't perfect, but at least I found 3 gold ones that match.  I'm not as happy with the shape of this version.  In the previous version I used 6 pieces of chain, but I reduced that to 5 in this one (around the back of the neck and down into the "V" is the first piece, across the top is the second, and then the 3 in the middle).  While I still like the look of it, I'm not as happy with how it holds its shape.  When I start making them for an Etsy store I'll keep the first design.  I also feel like I'll do some with and without the dangle of the left and right dice.  While it has a nice effect, I don't want everything to be overly ornate (even though I love it myself).  The next few pieces are going to be some simple stuff, since that seems to be what most in demand (or should I say all that is out there in regards to dice necklaces).

~Glitterforge Phoenix

First try at a Triforce

First draft of a Triforce inspired necklace (also with d20 & d8!)

The internet loves a good triforce, so I though I'd try to satisfy with something Zelda inspired.  I was running low on dice at the time so I scrounged what I could from my dice collection.  I'm pretty unhappy with the colors of the necklace.  It just didn't fit the theme, but the design worked okay.  It's actually 6 pieces of chain (choker around the neck, each side of the "V", and the 3 interior pieces).  Same chain and dice strategy as the previous necklace.  For the next necklace I'm going to do everything in gold to work better with the theme.  We shall see how it works ;-)

~Glitterforge Phoenix

The First Necklace

First Necklace - Generic Victorian Ornate Necklace (with dice!)

Overall the necklace was inspired by Victorian chokers and I feel it was a good first attempt at making something pretty.  The materials, except for the dice which I already had, were all purchased at a local big box craft store.  The chain is from a spool of aluminum unfinished curb chain and the findings are also probably aluminum (chain stores tend not to label materials).  The dice are hand-drilled all the way through using a 1/16" bit and a cordless electric drill.  I've found drilling from corner to corner is ideal (since who doesn't want the highest roll facing forward), but is challenging without a drill press (not impossible though if you have good aim).  Getting used to the tools is a big part of making this, but even after a single necklace it gets easier to loop the finding.  As a note, buy better pliers then I did or they twist while working.  Dice are on head pins with a single glass bead on each side and then looped onto the chain.  I'm still looking for a good place to buy unfinished bulk curb chain in better metals (preferably stainless steel).  Please leave me know if you have anywhere that is good.  I'll update soon with the next necklace

~Glitterforge Phoenix