Mage Hawke- Dragon Age 2

[carnivalflux]

So for an upcoming convention in May, I decided to be Hawke in her mage Champion armor (cause mage Hawke looks badass) I went to the Dragon Age photoshoot with the group who did Dragon Age last year at the same con and had a blast with them so I decided to do my own costume this year; it's my first OMG GIANT EFFORT SUPER HARDCORE costume. Before it was just kinda cosplays that I didn't put too much effort into but enough of an effort. So, this is me documenting how I do the thing and my progress!

For the planning stages, I planned what I want to make the stuff out of (note, this is more for my benefit and I wrote them as it was straight from my brain to "paper". If anyone needs or wants clarification on something, please don't hesitate to ask, this is copy and pasted from my word doc. with some added notes here)

Staff (based on Staff of Parthalan): Base- Giant-ass wooden pole that is currently taller than me, eventually cut to size. Will unscrew in the middle for easier transport. Also covered in a red ribbon.
Orb (done)- plastic fillable ornament sprayed with frosted glass paint and has red LED lights in it.
Weird branch things- apoxie sculpt with some sort of wire/foil base. Base will be sculpted onto pole (maybe) or somehow glued or something. The other branches that surround the orb will be made of same material but probably glued onto orb instead so I can easily remove the orb and open it up to replace the lights and batteries. Orb will probably be held down onto base via strong-ass velcro or my neodymium magnets. (leaning towards the latter).
Blade: Not sure if I wanna do that since placing staff down might be tough, but that's okay cause DA:I has a similar staff so I can write it off as being CLOSE ENOUGH. But if done, will probably foam board.

Chainmail sleeve (done): I was going with the four-in-one method with handmade rings but my parents kinda intervened and were like, bruh, so my dad bought like keychain rings and I made it out of that. I think handmade coulda worked...eventually. I kinda just made a row of rings and then connected each row on every other ring. It was easier for me since I've never done chainmail before. But I will try again in the future.

Armor:
Arm/shoulder armor- Will be a mix of craft foam and foamboard.
Chest- EVA floor mat mixed with foamboard
Leg- craft foam mixed with foamboard.

Leather work (for belt, bag, and other stuff): SURPRISE, IT'S CRAFTFOAM

Belt buckle: Sculpey. Probably strenghtened with resin and bondo since it doesn't seem like it's the strongest thing ever. It'll just be glued onto the belt, but I don't wanna take chances.

Clothes (pants and shirt): Like, IDK, man. I'm awful at sewing and making clothes. I'll probably just use an existing shirt (probably with at least some sort of leather vinyl bit sewed onto the front to make it more interesting) and the pants I'll probably use like black jeggings or something. Last time I tried to sew pants, I made one leg bigger than the other and they rode up.

BUTT CAPE: Easy enough to sew with even my lackluster skills, just black lined with red.

 

[carnivalflux]

Some photos I have so far, mostly just tests for everything (ranging from armor and lighting for the orb).

The leather armor: I used an iron to imprint the texture of a crumpled up sheet of aluminium foil onto craftfoam, plastdipped it (I need new plastidip so IDK how a real good spray can would go as the one I had was kinda just spraying in all directions and not like it should so I just kinda rubbed it on there). Painted it with a light brown. Then rubbed a dark brown over it with a paper towel.



The belt buckle that I sculpted in sculpey:




The orb with the LED lights in it, ranging from different lighting situations (outside in sunlight to inside to in my dark laundry room:




Chainmail triangle sleeve thing:

 

[carnivalflux]

Sorry for being away for a bit, some life stuff happened and then more life stuff and now I'm more determined than ever to kick this costume's butt. Life pro tip: If you are on medicaiton, or need to do something like keep your blood sugar n stuff monitored, DO IT. DON'T MESS AROUND. (My good friend and fellow gamer died recently. He was notorious for not monitoring his blood sugar levels and went into a diabetic coma and died. **** diabetes. So this costume is now my tribute to him since he loved DAII and was super excited to see this finished.)

Anyways, so I was getting frustrated with drafting patterns for the armor (I'm really bad at making straight lines n such so one corner might have been the proper angle while the opposite would be a completely different angle) and I actually found a set of pepakura files for the armor (something that I had been searching for for MONTHS). IDK how recently they had been made up but they look fantastic and I mocked up all the pieces using plain computer paper and was really pleased with the result. Although, I am not going to pep out the gauntlet since those pieces are WAY too complicated and ridiculous.

I've also worked on the top of the staff. I finished scultping and sanding and bondo-ed the top weird branch thing and it looks pretty cool! I glued it on to the staff and then blended the edges in with MORE apoxie sclupt. I then painted it white just to get a look at any more areas that need attention but I think it's ready for brown paint.

As you can see from the pre-sanded to the final photo, I removed the weird curly piece because it just didn't look right. I'm also not going to cut it in half like I originally planned for transportation since the vehicles that are up for discussion for this con adventure do have large trunks and can fit. It'd be more of something I'll look into if I ever plan on flying with this cosplay.

I've also just decided that for the orb, it will be on a slight tilt so that the bottom can be glued down but the top piece can still come apart and I can get into it to turn off the lights.

 

[VrisKCa]

It's looking great so far!
One question - where did you find the armor pepakura files? I haven't been able to find any. If you're able to, could you link to them? Thanks! c:

 

[carnivalflux]

Hey, sorry for not getting back to you! I honestly forgot I had this thread and for some reason, I never got an email notification telling me that someone had replied. :/

But here is where I got the files: https://www.onekura.com/blog/dragon-age-ii-hawke-mage-armour/

The person on there rehosted them from the pepakura FB page but I couldn't find it/whatever when I went to go look for them at the source. The website says you need an account or whatever to download from that blog, but I just created a fake account with a fake email generator since I didn't want spam. I assume that this person rehosting is a probably on the sketchy side but I couldn't find the original source of the files.