8 yo daughters Gene Simmons costume (pic heavy)

Hogosha

Hogosha

Sr Member
RPF PREMIUM MEMBER
Greetings RPFer's,
First off, I want to say thank you to all of you being such a great resource of information, and inspiration with all of the great talent I see here on the forum.

Here are some pics of the Gene Simmons Costume I made for my daughter for Halloween. It of course pays homage to Gene's "Destroyer" costume, but with so many versions over the years, I tried to take the best and adapt it to an 8 year old size. I'm not exactly sure how long it took, but I estimate well over 50+ hours.

Everything you see was 100% hand made by me..............even the kid.
 
Here are some close ups of the components. I lowered the resolution so they would load.

The Armor is made from a stripped down pee-wee football shoulder pad chassis (had I known how much I was going to strip it down, I would have started from scratch) The pieces you can see were cut from joint compound buckets using templates I made, shaped on my bench belt sander, then shaped with a heat gun. The larger shoulder pieces were reshaped and moved. The spikes were made from cardstock I printed templates on, cut out and put a couple of layers of paper mache' on. The rivets are googly eyes, and the welds are hot glue. I salvaged the straps and buckles off of an old piece of my kids clothing.

The wings are lightweight "pleather" made from a pattern I did on newspaper after measuring my daughters arms. The studs are hot glued on.

The belt, medallion, and codpiece, are a heavier pleather, done on the sewing machine. The studs are silver thumbtacks with the backs snipped off, and hot glued in place.

The boot "gaiters" are an old pair of her jeans, with the seem split, and 14" zippers installed. I made 3 different size scale templates on the computer, cut them out in rows and transferred that to stiff felt. I edged each scale with hot glue to give it extra depth, then spray painted the scales silver, then I went back in with the airbrush to darken the centers to add even more depth. Then I sewed the scales on in rows.

The dragon heads on the boots were actually shells I made over a pair of good will boots. I started by making a base using milk jugs. I cut a strip out of the center of the jug, and straightened it with the heat gun, and stapled it to the sole. I took one of the bottom corners of the jug and made the front, and the top was made using the top of the jug with the spout cut out. I put about 6-7 layers of paper mache' on for strength. I then sculpted the dragon heads using home made paper mache' clay. after all was dry, I primed and painted, to give more of a 3-D effect the teeth are made out of craft foam.

It took 3 trys to get the shells to stay on with an 8 year old running around with them on....but fast set gorilla glue did the trick! I hope you like it!
 
This thread made me chuckle out loud. Thanks for that. Great costume, great kid, great dad.

Good stuff all around!
 
Very cool but watch out Gene doesn't come and try and charge you for using his likeness in a costume. Ya know he would do anything for a buck lol.
 
Dood! I SO voted for this costume! It's freakin' beautiful!!!
You really need to find a way to get this pic to Gene. It's completely homemade for Halloween, I'm sure he would get a kick out of it and would probably send you an personalized autograph! :thumbsup
 
Fantastic Work! I've spent over 3 years upgrading and modding my scratch built Gene costume, and its still not at a point I'm completly happy with. I'm gonna have to use your idea for the leg scales, attaching them to some heavy denim seems like a fantastic idea! You should email those pictures to kissonline.com. They frequently update with pictures of Kids in KISS gear!

Absolutely AMAZING!
 
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