First Costume : Nightwing

[td1801]

Hey ! I'm new here, but I've been watching this forum for one year. I'm amazed by your works and I finally wanted to try myself at cosplay. First I would like to apologize for my bad english as it's a foreign language to me. I started month ago by doing a Donny Darko mask.. I did a mold and tried to do the mask on top of this with plaster. It didn't work and I was very frustrated ^^
Well. Yesterday I saw this (http://www.artofserg.com/batman-superman/) website in my feed and I fell in love with this nightwing. So I've thought of doing one. With more blue on the chest like this :

And a different mask. So. I have tought about using EVA foam to build the armor. But That wouldn't give a good texture (I think it's very important for the blue parts). I also wondered how you would build that ? Chest and arm appart ? Well... I'm a total newbie, and I want to keep this costume "cheap" (under 200$). And expensive fabric like Cordura wouldn't do the job. Can you help me with that ? I don't see how I could buy a full wearable suit like that ? where to cut the arms ?
Thanks in advance.

 

[Vox]

It is pretty common when building with EVA foam to make slight modifications to the design to suit practicality, especially when your source material is not real. Concept art, video game characters, comic book characters, etc. don't have to worry about whether or not costume parts will move naturally, or at all. Unfortunately we do.

My first impulse would be to do an undersuit of a blue compression shirt, and black compression pants. After that, it's a lot of templating and fabricating the individual armor panels, modifying the design as necessary into separate panels to allow for flexing (such as on the abdomen and chest). A rubber cabinet shelf liner laid over the pieces and spray painted will give you that carbon fiber look that some of the pieces have.

There's my 2 cents.

 

[davekirk]

Hey, cool project,
You could always get a sub dye undersuit and build a EVA foam chest plate and gaunlets. If the want a interesting pattern/texture you could use the reverse side of the foam as it often has a pattern on it.