Leeleethebunny
New Member
I don't have too many photos of this costume yet, but I suppose I can add more when I get back the photoshoots.
This is the Danielle Baptiste as the Angelus from the comic series The Witchblade/The Angelus. It took roughly 120 hours to put together and cost about $1200. I wore this to Dragon*con 2013 last week. This is my first time posting on the RPF so I'm not really sure the protocol. I looked through several other posts and there's no real consistency in what to put in here. I suppose I can just go piece by piece.
The Headpiece
The headpiece is all centered on a headband I purchased for like $2 from Michaels. It is entirely made of Worbla and EVA foam. There are two wings, 4 horns, and the head part. The entire thing was spray painted with 18k gold spray paint by Kryolan and then painted with red acrylic paint by Basics and finally gloss coated with basic Kryolan gloss final coating. All filigree on the entire costume is done with Tulip paint painstakingly (ugh) by hand.
The Arms and Legs
Both the arms and the leg armor pieces are made the same way on this costume. The base is a heat formed piece of Sintra foamed plastic with details done in Worbla. All of the jewels were cast in polyester resin with Douglas and Sturgess resin dye in Pink, I just used a metric done (like we're talking tablespoons) to make it a dark, rich colour. The wings on the arms are ripped off of these griffin toys I got from Michaels while the wings on the legs were sculpted in Chavant NSP in soft, molded in Rebound 40 and cast in Smooth Cast 300. Everything was painted with the same Kryolan 18k gold spray paint and Basics red acrylic. The leg armor has added details in EVA foam, so I had to use a meticulous layering process so it ended up looking right.
The Chestplate
The Chestplate was also made from several layers of Worbla. I used my mannequin body to form it. There's not much to this piece, it's just heat formed on the mannequin and painted the same way as everything else.
The Shoulders
The shoulders were done in the same way as the chest plate using my mannequin. They are also a couple layers thick. Again, not much to say here.
The Wings
I suppose I left the most exciting detail for last for a reason. For anyone interested in how I made the harness for these things, I made videos!
Here's how I made the harness: Wing Harness Progress part 1 - YouTube
And here's how I made the frame: Wings part 2 How to Build the Frame - YouTube
While my wings were far too heavy for this to work simply with what's contained in those videos and this tutorial: #be me? #bitch please
The harness is a great design and I think if you want to make a pair of up-style wings as opposed to my down then up style wings you could definitely use this.
For me, however, these were a nightmare.
I first of all, underestimated the difficultly of feathering these things. I thought, you know, one day of work should do it. The feathers in total took 8 hours per side, that's 32 hours. The harness took me another maybe 10, the frame another 6-8. These wings netted me about 60 hours of work minus the "blades" which were another 15 in and of themselves. Over 60% of time spent on this beast was all in the wings. Wings are no ******** joke.
When I put these on for the first time they immediately fell forward and were clearly not well-supported. I trussed them together with 9ga wire and things seemed to be ok. I walked around my shop and got good results.
However, when I got to the convention the joints proved to have weakened and all structural integrity was lost. I thought I would be relegated to a no winged Angelus, otherwise known as a failure. I was heartbroken, I cried my eyes out which was awful because I was wearing Sclera lens (From sclera-lenses.com). Those took 30 minutes just to put in my face and required two people. Someone to hold my eyes open and me to shove them in. My friend brought the wings back up to the room with promises that with all of the costumers we had available at Dragon*con we could definitely figure something out. I was pessimistic, I felt like a total failure, but I walked around a bit without them Saturday night and packed it in after a couple shoots.
What followed is truly costume history. My roommates John and Jerry worked furiously throughout the entire day Sunday to add more structure to my base. I used wye connectors on the harness leaving room for two more vertical PVC pipes to extend up into the arms fixing the folding problem. Everything looked amazing and I was truly stunned and moved by how much they helped me at the expense of walking around the con that day. When I went to put them on, however, other problems arose. The wings fell back and choked me with the criss-cross harness or the fell forward knocking off my headpiece. In a last ditch effort we uncrossed the straps and ran them up over the new structure so they gathered more of the wings against my back and distributed their pull on my shoulders. I put them on with ease (unlike the horrible criss-cross) and stood there in silence. I often had to ask who was holding on to them and where before we could truly test them. When I asked this time, however, the answer was very surprising.
"I'm not holding on at all". The wings were viable! They stood on their own! They weren't choking me or falling over, I walked around the room, put on the headpiece and we all exchanged hearty high-fives for making these stupid things work!
THAT is my story of how these wings came to life. It may have been 90% me, but that last 10% John, Jerry and Alyssa was the linchpin in determining if I could wear them or not. Truly a team effort!
Supplies
