Akasha cosplay (final results)

Ayla's Akasha cosplay

This is the finale for the Akasha cosplay, as seen at Connecticon.  It was a success, but there were some intense final days.  The trapezoid shells on the belt were originally square.  This seemed fine until placed on the belt (one of the last pieces to be finished).  That meant putting a cutting disc on the rotary tool and putting on a breathing mask again.  Cutting seashell is not a fun process.  The sewing went well, despite it being my first time, and everything fit properly.  The final work on the crown was attaching the 3 coins that connect the main piece and the wire across the middle of the points.  I forgot to take a picture after the crown was completed because these were left unattached until the morning of the con.  While the epoxy is rated at a couple thousand pounds of force, I didn't want to leave the coins strung between the two wires in case the long-term stress caused a problem.

And here is the real final result of the work.  We entered the costume into the novice craftsmanship competition and received the first place prize.  I'm glad it all came together so well.  I owe a lot of that success to Ayla, her knowledge of the jewelry involved, and the idea to use this costume at all.

Akasha cosplay Necklace

Akasha cosplay necklace

Now we have the necklace for the Akasha cosplay.  This is pretty straight-forward compared to a lot of the other pieces. There is a lot of the same middle-eastern jewelry seen in the crown, and a lot of little spacers that had to be strung on bead wire.  The center-piece had to be made from a bracelet (flattened) and pendant soldered together.  The round discs are made from clay beads available from the crafts store, and then painted gold.  Several pieces had to be drilled so that jump rings could be attached where needed.  Overall, this was one of the easier (although more expensive) pieces of the cosplay.

Akasha cosplay crown

Here is the long overdue update on the Akasha cosplay.  There were a busy couple weeks to get it ready for Connecticon, so I only have a few process photos.  The blue-green points are made from glass mosaic tiles, which were put into a clay mold and coated with a think epoxy.  The original idea was to use a casting resin to hold the pieces, but it wasn't strong enough in the thin layers needed.  An important step was coating the mold in petroleum-jelly to keep it from sticking.

The jewelry are middle-eastern tribal jewelry, which are consistent with the original costume.  Many pieces aren't yet attached in the photos, but you can see how all the pieces have been adhered to a hair band for support (also using a thick epoxy).  The final touches for the crown are some soldering and wire-work (bronze wire for its strength) to link all the pieces together (and the crown points).

Akasha cosplay skirt (part 2 - shells and rings)

Akasha cosplay skirt piece

After being on vacation for a while I finally finished the the Akasha cosplay skirt shells (for the front at least).  It consists of 50 shells drilled and connected via gold finished rings.  It can also be adjusted by adding additional rows and columns if necessary.  This ended up being half the amount I have and expected to use due to an error in my estimation of ring sizes.  I had some rings on hand and thought they were 14 gauge, 1/2" diameter rings so that is what I placed an order for.  They turned out to be 16 gauge with a slightly smaller diameter.  The end result was a bit of re-drilling for the larger rings and slightly more space between shells.  The plus of the mistake is that they move a lot better than the previous size and there is enough shells to do a full front and back decoration.  I learned after this problem that there are pdf's available on the internet where you can print and match the gauge size on this type of ring (pdf's should always print the same regardless of printer).  It shows that sometimes cut twice measure once can work out anyway if you look at the pros and cons of the mistake.

How-to do product photography

Newest triforce necklace

As with everything on this site, I've doing a lot of "learning as you go".  My Etsy store is finally up, although I don't have anything listed yet.  Before you list things you want to take good photos showing off what you made, and so far that really hasn't been the case.  The above photo of my new triforce necklace is a good example of how much more things will stand out with a good image.

What I started with:

• Decent camera (preferably something you can manually focus)
• White photo area (can be a box with a reasonably white sheet/poster-board)
• GNU image manipulation program (a.k.a. poor mans photoshop)

 Basically, don't lie to yourself and say that you can make good product photos without photoshopping them to some extent.  If you browse Etsy or any other store every image that really stands out has probably been edited to some moderate extent.  The most blaring example is the white background.  No actual photo has a "white" background, but having a clean background makes the product really stand out.  To achieve this you take the photo of the item in the white box. Do this WITHOUT THE FLASH.  A tripod really helps here because your camera will need to take the photo over a longer duration and everyone shakes a little (I don't have a tripod yet so my photos are always a little blurry still).  You need it without flash because most crafts are shiny and the flash with reflect (rendering the dice difficult to see in the case of my jewelry).  Next you take your image (which is probably somewhat dark since you didn't use a flash) and run it through an image editor.  Most of the time you can just do some kind of "auto-whiteness" adjustment on the image to get the darkness out of the image.  After that use the magic wand (I set it to a tolerance of around 80) to select the almost-white background (hold shift to add in areas that are enclosed like the areas inside the necklace).  Go to the selection menu, click feather, and do around a 5 pixel feather (softens edges around the item).  Then take the paint bucket, pick white color, set tolerance to max, and fill in everywhere selected with white.  Overall, pretty simple to get a much nicer image.  See below for the other jewelry I did this for.

~Glitterforge Phoenix
 P.S. - Around 5 days until the order comes in to continue work on the Akasha Cosplay costume

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