The Amazing Spider-man 2 costume build in progress

I've been reading threads about Spider-man costumes on here for at least 7-8 years always planning to make one myself eventually. It's finally time!

I've been working at it for months now, but it's been slow going getting everything together. My deadline is when I leave for San Diego Comic-Con on July 8th and it's going to be a close-run thing. After going back and forth about actually creating a thread about my costume build, I've decided to go ahead and do so.

Over the next couple of weeks, I'll add some posts that fill in what's happened so far until I catch up to where I'm at. Then I'll try to keep the posts coming during the mad rush of finishing everything. Okay, first actual costume post coming tomorrow

PATTERN
I'm going to skip right past the research phase. Well, almost skip. It was tens of hours of digging through hundreds of really amazing posts about Spider-man builds. There are a lot of creative and talented people turning out really impressive costumes on here. Eventually, I settled on some combination on what I saw that I wanted to make myself.

So. I decided that I wanted a costume with authentic seams, instead of a dye-sub with printed seams. I didn't really find a pattern option for that, but I didn't want to attempt a pattern from scratch like a lot of adventurous people. I went with kenlandrum's pattern. Actually, shout out to kenlandrum for all of his graciously provided free TASM2 costume resources. I've been leaning heavily on those.

After some price confusion with my local Office Depot, I was able to print the pattern on paper for $40 (twice as much as I'd been quoted over the phone, but half as much they wanted to charge me at the counter). Still way cheaper than a print onto fabric. The goal was to have each section printed unbroken somewhere on the paper so that it could be cut apart and used as a standard sewing pattern. I was pretty happy with the result.



So, I have a pattern to use for creating my (mostly) authentic-seam suit.

Interested to see where you go with this Good luck

Hey i just started too. Any tips?:/ Or how do I use theRPF because I want to show my own progress too. Well anyway, good luck and I will follow you're progress!

SpiderProject said:

Hey i just started too. Any tips?:/ Or how do I use theRPF because I want to show my own progress too. Well anyway, good luck and I will follow you're progress!

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Hi SpiderProject! My biggest tip would just be to take advantage of all of the great advice that people have offered during their various builds here on theRPF. I find it helpful to use a search engine to search for what I want and add "rpf" to the search, or choose the "More results from www..." option. I have trouble with the onsite search. As far as how to use theRPF in general, maybe take a look at the FAQs and see if that's helpful

jaredjonz Thank you! I hope you're suit is going fine, when does any updates come?
And if you have some time feel free to follow my progress. Could use some more advice.

I have a post coming about fabric, probably tonight, but I decided to pull this quick note about my decisions surrounding dye sublimation out of the fabric post and just throw it in here now instead.

DYE SUBLIMATION

I said before that I opted against a dye-sub suit. Note: a "dye-sub suit" (as I'm using it) is where the whole suit pattern - color, texture, seams, and (often) muscles - are printed onto white fabric using a process called dye sublimation.

One of the deciding factors for me there was the reports that the white fabric typically shows through when the fabric is stretched, lightening the colors. Also, everyone who I found willing to do dye sublimation wanted a fabric low in nylon, which excludes most (all?) spandex fabrics that have the shiny property of the movie suit (anyone feel free to jump in if I'm lying about this (or at any other point)).

This is the condensed version. Even so, not exactly brief. I could have written 4 times as much, but I tried to keep it to the high level details.


FABRIC


Let me start by acknowledging that I'm not 100% happy with what I found, but I'm reasonably happy. That said, let's talk about fabric.


First, I tried getting swatches from a couple of places online, not a pleasant experience overall. For example, one Etsy store took weeks of back and forth before finally sending 50 1" squares of all of their spandex colors (see below) instead of the 6 4"x6" swatches of the relevant blue and red colors that I wanted, ordered, and paid for. Super frustrating.




By that time, I was only a few weeks out from a trip to New York. Priority number one for the trip became Spider-man fabric. The Garment District in New York is amazing! Unsurprisingly, I'd never had a reason to dig through places called Spandex World and Stretch House before (or any other place in the Garment District). It was so helpful to actually see and feel the fabric on the spot.


The main issues I found:
- RED: deciding whether to try to match the purplish/pinkish cast of the movie suit

- BLUE: finding a dark blue that was dark but still blue


Red is just so inconsistent in photographs that's it's hard to get a sense of the actual color without having seen it in person myself. I did find a pinkish spandex that matched the color in lunaman's photos pretty perfectly.


*****Btw, these photos are super helpful to anyone doing a TASM2 build. Huge thanks to Lunaman for posting them!!*****


The pinkish fabric gave me the pink tones, but it didn't also give me the clearly red tones from the movie and other photos. So, I chickened out and went with a truer red to avoid accidentally ending up as a pink Spider-man. Of course, this isn't an accurate picture because of the red issues, but you can get an idea of the contrast here - red on top/pink on bottom (I added an arrow that points to another fabric that photographed a little closer to the actual color of the pink fabric):




With the blue fabric, I was looking at navy fabrics until, after looking closely at photos, I decided that the suit fabric should be much more blue and the overall darker cast was more a product of the black screen printing on top of it. So, I ended up with a pretty standard blue as well.




Spandex House was the winner, btw. Great selection and very well organized (comparitively). I can't speak for how well they handle their online sales though.


In the end, my colors are middle of the road Spider-man red and blue. So, not 100% happy with the result, but I'm hoping to nudge the colors in the right direction with the screen printing.

jaredjonz said:

This is the condensed version. Even so, not exactly brief. I could have written 4 times as much, but I tried to keep it to the high level details.


FABRIC


Let me start by acknowledging that I'm not 100% happy with what I found, but I'm reasonably happy. That said, let's talk about fabric.


First, I tried getting swatches from a couple of places online, not a pleasant experience overall. For example, one Etsy store took weeks of back and forth before finally sending 50 1" squares of all of their spandex colors (see below) instead of the 6 4"x6" swatches of the relevant blue and red colors that I wanted, ordered, and paid for. Super frustrating.

View attachment 495020


By that time, I was only a few weeks out from a trip to New York. Priority number one for the trip became Spider-man fabric. The Garment District in New York is amazing! Unsurprisingly, I'd never had a reason to dig through places called Spandex World and Stretch House before (or any other place in the Garment District). It was so helpful to actually see and feel the fabric on the spot.


The main issues I found:
- RED: deciding whether to try to match the purplish/pinkish cast of the movie suit

- BLUE: finding a dark blue that was dark but still blue


Red is just so inconsistent in photographs that's it's hard to get a sense of the actual color without having seen it in person myself. I did find a pinkish spandex that matched the color in lunaman's photos pretty perfectly.


*****Btw, these photos are super helpful to anyone doing a TASM2 build. Huge thanks to @Lunaman for posting them!!*****


The pinkish fabric gave me the pink tones, but it didn't also give me the clearly red tones from the movie and other photos. So, I chickened out and went with a truer red to avoid accidentally ending up as a pink Spider-man. Of course, this isn't an accurate picture because of the red issues, but you can get an idea of the contrast here - red on top/pink on bottom (I added an arrow that points to another fabric that photographed a little closer to the actual color of the pink fabric):

View attachment 495021


With the blue fabric, I was looking at navy fabrics until, after looking closely at photos, I decided that the suit fabric should be much more blue and the overall darker cast was more a product of the black screen printing on top of it. So, I ended up with a pretty standard blue as well.

View attachment 495022


Spandex House was the winner, btw. Great selection and very well organized (comparitively). I can't speak for how well they handle their online sales though.


In the end, my colors are middle of the road Spider-man red and blue. So, not 100% happy with the result, but I'm hoping to nudge the colors in the right direction with the screen printing.

View attachment 495023

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I've seen the suit in person. ANd the blue is a very dark blue/borderline black. I think that, if you use the black brick shiny screen printing on top the blue you have now, the black color will stick out too much. RPF member @kiyominai was actually able to replicate the screen printing (using a specialized black ink with shiny beads) and he used fabric that was very dark, a very dark blue which I think was really great.

Although, (with the RGB shenanigans of lowering the shades of the colors in mind) I really like the color choices you picked out.

isunk, okay. Well, I already have the fabric now, so I guess I'll be using it I was going with shots like the following:



The fabric itself (inside of the black screen printing) hit me as more blue than dark, so I decided to err on that side. But like I said, I knew I was working imperfectly from photos and that I wasn't getting exactly what I wanted ultimately anyway. Thanks for the feedback!

I can sympathize with the agonizing over fabric choices. It's been clear to me since the get-go that "regular" spandex just doesn't have the sheen or depth of color that the movie costume's fabric has. And whenever I've seen a costume from a member here with a fabric that *does* come pretty close, they're often mum or unhelpful about what type of fabric it is. Which is their right, I guess, if they wanna stand out from the pack.

Ultimately, I wouldn't let accuracy hinder you. Let personal aesthetic preference trump all else--it's your costume, after all, and for all the time and effort you'll put into it, the end result should be pleasing to *your* eye. Besides, the "official" costume changes often enough that trying to stay current on accuracy is a losing game, anyway, that none but the most serious cosplayers will give you grief over.

I suppose. But it's still a fun game to play

SHOES

On shoes, I made a mistake, but I'm happy about it. I feel like I saw several photos that led me to believe that the shoe inside of the costume came up higher than the ankle. However, now I can only find one:



And I see way more photos that clearly show an ankle-high shoe under the spandex, like so:



But like I said, I was already off and running with the boot idea, totally missing the sneaker. I saw that a lot of people were preferring a boxing shoe and I agreed that the shape was nice. It also provided for good flexibility. The shape of the sole is a little weird for attaching the patterned sole, but it should be fine. I decided on Nike Machomai boxing shoes:



Those have the obvious problem of toe to above-the-ankle laces that have to be loosened and tightened once they're encased in spandex. So, I removed the laces, tacked down the edges of the tongue nearest the toe, and added bands of elastic so that the boots could be slipped on:



I had to sew the elastic down (by hand) so that the two sides of the shoe were as close to each other as possible, allowing room for the tongue. This allowed just enough stretch for me to get my foot into them, but still kept them tight enough to hold to my foot and leg as I walk.

So yeah. Not movie accurate here, but I think it will give a nicer line around the ankle.

This build is looking interesting! Can't wait to see the end result.

About the shoes, I'd say you're still accurate. I got tons of ref pics, and most of them show that they used high top shoes.



You can see the bulge. However, in some pictures, they clearly use ankle high shoes. This leads me to believe that they only use the ankle shoes for specific scenes.

matthewdelacruz said:

This build is looking interesting! Can't wait to see the end result.

About the shoes, I'd say you're still accurate. I got tons of ref pics, and most of them show that they used high top shoes.

View attachment 496204View attachment 496205View attachment 496206

You can see the bulge. However, in some pictures, they clearly use ankle high shoes. This leads me to believe that they only use the ankle shoes for specific scenes.

Click to expand...

There were different types of shoes made for each suit used on set. A few used for stunts, and the other for aesthetic purposes. When I was on set, I saw one of the stunt doubles unzip his shoe so that they could wire something onto it before the dude climbed onto a car.

@matthewdelacruz and isunk, that makes sense. Thanks for the clarifications on the two types of shoes!

SCREEN PRINTING

Because I'm crazy, I ended up screen printing the fabric myself. I tried to get a few professional places to take the job, but was unsuccessful. One place even told me that screen printing spandex isn't possible, as it will be destroyed in the process. The interwebs and another screen printer confirmed that that is simply not true.

In any case, after much difficulty and the stress of having to work it out on a REALLY tight timeline, I came to a point where I could produce a respectable print:



I had intended, for the red fabric, to try to shift the color of the fabric from more red to more cherry/purple/etc. I tried out some different mixes of inks. One batch is shown below. It is the base red ink on the left with progressively more blue mixed in until the color farthest to the right is solidly brown.



For this batch, all of the inks with blue mixed in just skewed too dark. After a couple of ink tests, I decided just to go with the base red ink. No color correction gained, but it gave good results for the sheen from various angles when compared to photos.

Before printing, I traced the pattern pieces onto sections of fabric:



I was working with a smaller print area than I would have liked, though. Not all of the pieces would entirely fit in one print. This led to some really unfortunate edges between sections where I attempted to hit one piece with multiple prints. I found that attempting to line up the prints didn't work at all. So, I ended up printing them with intentional gaps and then handpainting in the remaining area. Some sections were more successful than others. Here's one example of the hand-painted gap:



Given unlimited time and fabric, I would have done many attempts at each print until the sketchy in between parts had smooth transitions for all of them. Under the circumstances, what I have is going to be good enough though.

jaredjonz said:

SCREEN PRINTING

Because I'm crazy, I ended up screen printing the fabric myself. I tried to get a few professional places to take the job, but was unsuccessful. One place even told me that screen printing spandex isn't possible, as it will be destroyed in the process. The interwebs and another screen printer confirmed that that is simply not true.

In any case, after much difficulty and the stress of having to work it out on a REALLY tight timeline, I came to a point where I could produce a respectable print:

View attachment 496523

I had intended, for the red fabric, to try to shift the color of the fabric from more red to more cherry/purple/etc. I tried out some different mixes of inks. One batch is shown below. It is the base red ink on the left with progressively more blue mixed in until the color farthest to the right is solidly brown.

View attachment 496518

For this batch, all of the inks with blue mixed in just skewed too dark. After a couple of ink tests, I decided just to go with the base red ink. No color correction gained, but it gave good results for the sheen from various angles when compared to photos.

Before printing, I traced the pattern pieces onto sections of fabric:

View attachment 496522

I was working with a smaller print area than I would have liked, though. Not all of the pieces would entirely fit in one print. This led to some really unfortunate edges between sections where I attempted to hit one piece with multiple prints. I found that attempting to line up the prints didn't work at all. So, I ended up printing them with intentional gaps and then handpainting in the remaining area. Some sections were more successful than others. Here's one example of the hand-painted gap:

View attachment 496524

Given unlimited time and fabric, I would have done many attempts at each print until the sketchy in between parts had smooth transitions for all of them. Under the circumstances, what I have is going to be good enough though.

Click to expand...

This is a really great job. Screen printing on spandex is totally possible. But i think the places that were pointing out how you can't print on them are referring to the temperatures used to cure spandex as it can't handle heat too well.

That is especially true if you use specialty ink as higher temperatures can increase shine for many ink types.

jaredjonz said:

Because I'm crazy, I ended up screen printing the fabric myself. I tried to get a few professional places to take the job, but was unsuccessful. One place even told me that screen printing spandex isn't possible, as it will be destroyed in the process. The interwebs and another screen printer confirmed that that is simply not true.

Click to expand...

Story of my life, mate :lol I asked several shops if they could screen print the bricks onto the suit, and most of them would overcharge me or tell me that it's not possible, and some even told me that it's way too big. I was supposed to screen print red bricks myself on my suit, but i gave up since i couldn't get them to line up properly. so i decided not to. I puffy painted the bricks on the blue though. Saved me a lot of money.

kiyominai said:

This is a really great job. Screen printing on spandex is totally possible. But i think the places that were pointing out how you can't print on them are referring to the temperatures used to cure spandex as it can't handle heat too well.

That is especially true if you use specialty ink as higher temperatures can increase shine for many ink types.

Click to expand...

kiyominai, thanks! Yeah, they did say that the spandex would be destroyed by the heat in the process. I took that to mean that their process isn't customizable enough to be modified to not destroy spandex. But really, the tone of the conversation felt more like they were just trying to get rid of me

One thing that I forgot to mention as part of the process above is that I had a screen printer print me a transparency for the screen exposure process. While it was printing, we were chatting and he thought the idea of not being able to print on/cure spandex was ridiculous. He has been a screen printer for some 20+ years. Maybe it's a question of experience. I should have called him out above. He was super helpful.

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matthewdelacruz said:

Story of my life, mate :lol I asked several shops if they could screen print the bricks onto the suit, and most of them would overcharge me or tell me that it's not possible, and some even told me that it's way too big. I was supposed to screen print red bricks myself on my suit, but i gave up since i couldn't get them to line up properly. so i decided not to. I puffy painted the bricks on the blue though. Saved me a lot of money.

Click to expand...

@matthewdelacruz, yes, I suppose the puffy paint would have been MUCH cheaper :-D