purefusion's 2014 Halloween Costume Contest Entry: Vitruvius from The Lego Movie

purefusion · Nov 4, 2014

Every year for the past several years I've done some sort of costume for Halloween, even if it's only to wear while passing out candy to the kids in the neighborhood. Each year, my costume-making trend seems to be moving towards amping up the complexity. My costumes started out pretty simple, but they've always been pretty interesting and atypical as far as costumes are characters go. I pick characters that aren't your run-of-the-mill costumes that you'd find other people wearing. I tend to aim for uniqueness, things no one else would have thought of. The likelihood of finding such costumes in a store is pretty slim to none as well.

Nowadays, my neighbors have come to expect impressive costume designs from me. My first year, I was Ace Ventura, and I did my hair and wore an "Ace Ventura pet detective" name tag. Simple stuff. The next year was the year of those Wendy's wigs, where the guys in the commercials wore the red wigs with gravity defying pigtails and did dumb things like kicking trees. So I made one of those wigs. That was fun. The next year I amped things up quite a bit and made a light up Tron outfit. That was quite impressive. Last year, I decided to go all out and build a crazy huge Wreck-It Ralph costume, which is how I first stumbled upon The RPF forums. I was just looking for ways to build with foam, and I came across 2012's costume contest winner, The Incredible Hulk. That costume was pretty sweet. I enjoyed working with the foam, but this year it was time to try something new.

The Lego Movie came out earlier this year, and it was a surprising hit. In a vote for relevance, I decided to create Lego Movie costumes for me and the family. Wanting to deviate from what might be popular, character wise, at first I was thinking I wanted to do Lord Business in his super tall outfit. But I had to come to terms with the fact that that would've been a bit much, especially considering that I would need to be able to reach my kids when they needed assistance while trick-or-treating, so anything with stilts were out. So I decided to do Vitruvius instead, which excited me quite a bit since it would also allow me to use some of the leftover light strips from my Tron outfit from a couple years back. For the kids, my daughter Elise decided she wanted to be Unikitty, and Andrew was too young to make any specific decisions so we decided to stick with Emmet, the hero of the movie, for him. I expected to see other Emmet costumes out there, But Andrew was the only one surprisingly enough.

Pictures below…

purefusion · Nov 4, 2014

To make the Lego heads, I decided to go the papier-mâché route and utilize some rounded mixing bowls that already had most of the Lego head shape. I made one small head for Emmet and a large head for Vitruvius. After a couple cycles of layering papier-mâché and letting it dry, I covered each head with joint compound to smooth out and mask the papier-mâché texture. After that dried, some sanding and painting was in order. Yellow for Emmet's head, and a tan color for Vitruvius.

Next up was definitely a more challenging component of the costumes, namely the hair and beard. No Papercraft tutorials for those parts! I had to craft those components entirely by hand using good old fashioned artistic sculpturing skills, which I don't have much background with as it were. In any case, I decided to stick with the papier-mâché and joint compound approach, but do it over a shapable wire mesh form. I wanted each piece to be removable from the head, just like real Lego components are removable from their persons. So, throughout the shaping process, I was constantly holding up each piece I was working on to the respective head I had built to make sure it had a good fit.

Here's a timelapse of me working on the top hair:

It took several tries to get the ideal desirable shape of the hair and beard, but I eventually ended up with shapes for these components that I was relatively satisfied with. Covering the wire mesh with papier-mâché was not easy though, as the paper often did not want to stick to the mesh. In hindsight, I probably should have put the papier-mâché pieces on the inside of the wire form, and covered the outside with only joint compound. In the end it probably would have saved me from tons of extra sanding that I had to do to ensure the parts had a smooth finish.

For the final "piece of resistance" if you will, I decided to make Vitruvius' eyes light up. I attached LED strips, angled to the side, so they would cast their light upon the white circles I had cut from the same sheet of shower curtain that I had used for the Tron outfit from prior years.

As much as I wanted to make an authentic Lego shaped body for Vitruvius, ultimately I still need to be able to maneuver and take care of my kids while trick-or-treating so I opted to just do a simple robe with blue cape made of iridescent blue fabric that I sourced from Hancock Fabrics.

For Andrew, being only 18 months old, I knew he probably wouldn't have liked to wear a full box around his body, so I did a simple Front side view for his costume body component. But I made his leg covers shaped like Lego feet at the bottom. I also made the faux legs flexible enough so that they can move as he walked. If I were to do it again, I would probably just find a really stiff fabric, learn how to sew and make square-legged pants that could flex when worn.

For the Unikitty costume, I decided to keep it simple and rely on the "cuteness factor" of the overall costume to impress, as she was probably the only one in the entire world going as Unikitty. Or perhaps one of a mere handful, if there are a few equally creative people out there. I decided to make this costume to scale, so I did a lot of measuring and scaling of original Lego units up to a size that would be suitable for Elise to wear. She just turned three, so I decided to make the main piece 8" x 24". After cutting some cardboard to size, I reinforced it with extra cardboard pieces with corrugation running in perpendicular direction to the main piece. I left it open at the top so that she could move freely and position her body wherever felt most comfortable. For the head, I cut a new piece of cardboard with the face hole out of it, because I know she doesn't like to have her face covered. Then I painted the Unikitty character face onto the head using dimensional fabric paint.

Proof photo: