How a cosplay costume is created
What is cosplay? It's such a fierce mixture of masquerade and performance. You take the image of your favorite character and try it on yourself. You can try it on at home in front of a mirror, you can appear in the image at a festival, or you can take part in a performance.
The attention of the audience is guaranteed. You get photographed, you get photographed, you get interviewed, you get hugged by children—the spark, the storm, the madness. In the worst cases, it takes more than 40 minutes to get from the stage to the dressing room.
Some are looking for attention, some are breaking stereotypes through a change of image, some like to work with their hands, some get high on creative solutions.
How a cosplay costume is created
Levitating skirts, three-meter axes, breaking the laws of physics and the most degenerate cut designs—you can meet all this in our field. And the task of the master is to develop all this from scratch, with only concepts in hand.
We start working on the image by taking apart the reference, the image of the hero. Sometimes we are lucky, and we find the technical parsing of the costume at once. But more often we have some images with no details and unrealistic proportions compared to a real person. Our task is to optimize this picture so that the final work is as close to the reference as possible.
On the basis of the illustration, the artist draws a technical sketch and prescribes the basic techniques to be used in the creation of the image. Patterns we usually assemble ourselves from scratch, but patterns for individual characters can already be bought online at specialized sites.
Some supplies for the costumes we always have in stock, but fabrics, accessories, and decor elements we buy specifically for the project. Most typically we buy them in usual stores, but sometimes we order them from abroad or go to other cities.
Complex jobs like printing on fabric, computer embroidery, vacuum forming, and laser cutting are ordered from contractors. The project manager's headache is coordinating the contractors' work with ours. The costume designer has to get everything in on time.
Cosplay commissions are always different. Depending on the complexity of the costume.