Black Nova/ Sam Alexander (WIP)

[brennana]

What's Up!

I've been thinking about doing a Nova cosplay for a long time now, and am now finally getting around to it. I've been collecting the comics and he has been my favorite super heros for years now. I've really enjoyed the modern series but I also love the classics, and was excited to see the Nova core in the MCU.

Having all of the differing styles of Novas made it hard to pick which one I wanted to cosplay, and what I've decided was to have it mainly based on Sam Alexander's suit. I'm planning on pulling details from the other Novas to make a unique creation, while keeping the general theme of Sam's Nova. I'll have the Helmet and color scheme the same as Sam's, but as far as the look and materials of the suit I'll make some changes. The plan so for is to have a black under suit and all of the gold on his costume will be armor instead of fabric. I'm not going for 100% accuracy, I just want to make something that I think looks good, and to be a little creative with it.

Some Reference:

This is one my favorite artists renderings of Nova. It's by Adi Gronov and its been the main inspiration for this Cosplay. I'm going to try to keep the colours and some of the general shapes from this piece.

This is from Annihilation Nova and i'm going to use the star pattern on his back because I like it better than the three golden circles on Sam's costume.

Like this.

This is the MCU Nova corps uniform that is at Disneyland at the Guardians of the Galaxy - Mission: Breakout ride, which was super cool to see. What i'm going to take from this is the more armored look. I think this will be easier to make more realistic and is better then a dude just in spandex. Also I think i'm going to try to have the circles on my costume light up like they do on this one.

This is a 3d model for the helmet that I bought on Etsy by Maleventum 3d that i'll be printing.
3D Model for 3D printing by Maleventum3d (Their Page)

As i'm not a terribly experienced sewer, i'm going to use one of Yaya Han's patterns for the under suit. This one is McCalls M7340 and you can get it at Joann's or Amazon.

These are the fabrics that I'll be using, they are also from Yaya Han. I don't know what they're called specifically, but I am really digging them. They were a bit spendy, but I think they'll be worth it. I'm going to use the square pattern for the main parts of the suit and the hex pattern for the accents. You can get these at Joann's.

The Nova Prime Page
Also The Nova Prime Page is a super cool website all about Nova and has a good page all about the different costumes through the years.

That's all I've got for now, here's my progress on the first part of the printed helmet!

 

[brennana]

What's up again!

Just a little update, I've made just a little progress with the suit and the helmet.

First off the first piece of the helmet I tried to print ended up failing about 12 hours in, which sucked

But I knew what happened and was able fix it and now have two pieces done!

What ended up happening was my build plate adhesion wasn't very good and the print popped off the bed. Easy enough fix though, just re-sliced it with a brim this time and it worked great! Also this was the first time I tried using tree supports, they're great, I saved so much filament using it with this print.

I did have a wierd line show up one one of the prints, not sure why this happened but it should sand off easy enough.

I also made some progress on the suit. I ended up buying some cheap fabric that had the same amount of stretch as the fabric I will be using has. I practiced the pattern with this and I'm really glad I did. I made a lot of mistakes on it and learned what I could from them. But in the end it ended up looking pretty good.

Funky colour I know. I was able to get the fit down pretty good and was then confident enough to use the real fabric. And I did!

It went pretty good. Had some troubles but figured them out in the end. The fabric I used for the main body was really slippery so I had to use lots of pins to keep it from getting misaligned. But beyond that the pattern was pretty clear and made it easy, and I was able to get it together despite my stupid brain.

The two different types of fabric aren't that different and its not that noticeable, but I still think it adds a nice bit of variance. Most of it will be under armor anyway (which will hide my sewing crimes) but the different textures will help break it up a bit.

Also flipping through a few Nova issues I found quite a bit of good reference. Check it

These two were good showing the gorget (neck armor piece)

Don't quite know how i'm gonna do that, but I'll figure it out

Anyways that's all I've got for now. More to come!

 

[brennana]

What's up! Lots of progress on the helmet today, been working away at it and now its almost done. But I've had my fair share of trials on the way.

So I got all the pieces printed out for the main body, and it was looking great. There was just one problem...

It don't fit on my head.

I was able to get all of the pieces to fit around my head, but the problem was the hole to get it on my head was too small. Soooooo

I split the model into two pieces a top and a bottom. The top will be glued to the helmet and my head is able to fit into that. Then the bottom piece is going to attach to the helmet after a put it on. I tried to make there be as few seams as possible and where there were seams make them follow the edges of the model to make the seams be easier to hide. I'm going to try to attach them using magnets, but I have yet to figure that out.

And so I reprinted the bottom half of the helmet and got it glued to the top and started sanding. So much sanding. I used testors contour putty to fill in the main seams and sanded those smooth, and got most of the print lines sanded down. I used xtc-3d to get everything even smoother and sanded down any high spots.

Then I primed it and more sanding. I used rust-oleum grey primer. Then ...

I printed this jumbled mess. This is the star and I did much the same process for this. Sand, fill, xtc-3d, primer sand. And then ...

Paint!

I used krylons black paint/ primer for the helmet then rust-oleums red for the star. It's getting closer, but there's still lot to do.

That's all I got for now, more to come soon!

 

[Frixcon]

It's looking great so far! Thanks for sharing I'm starting my own print of that exact file soon, so it's nice to know that the bottom can be problematic Good luck on the rest of your costume!