Dir en Grey - Toshiya - Yokan Cosplay

This took longer than I thought it was going to be and in fact the manga convention I did sew this cosplay for has already passed. ORZ. In my defense I need to say I worked all week and everything has been a bit hectic but well, later is better than never.

Toshiya's Yokan cosplay has been one of my favourite and one of the dream cosplays I've always wanted to do from him, along with other ones such as Cage or Macabre. ( One day... One day... )

The thing about this cosplay is that is from a PV that was released in the year 1999. I don't know how familiar you are with Dir en Grey and/or the whole Visual Kei scene but here is the video to give you an idea with which kind of quality you are dealing with.

The quality itself is not that horrible but the whole thing is fucking white including the setting, their outfits and everything. You can't really tell what are they wearing from the PV anyway. The bad thing is that there aren't really good pictures out of this outfit either.
So basically after researching for any image I could take from the internet, the only decent picture of Toshiya I could find was this one.

 The hair and the make-up is different than from the PV but it's the best shot you can get from Toshiya's whole outfit. Of course there's not a close up of his make-up or any image of his back, but I've started to work on the cosplay basing in this image and a few cosplay pictures I found while surfing around DeviantArt and Cosplay.com

I had the fabric since a while ago, I've used a special cotton fabric which in Spanish is called bambula I have no idea how it's called in English I'm sorry, but I always thought it was the fabric Toshiya's own outfit ( and I assume the rest of the band ) is made of. It's kind of wrinkled and a bit translucent and it worked perfectly in the end.

( I want to say sorry first about the quality of the pictures, I don't own a digital camera yet and my phone is an old BlackBerry so the pictures it takes are really bad ones. I hope is not that bad though. T_T; )

The materials I used, the fabric bambula, for the heart shaped stain and the letters I've used acrylic paint and then the metallic muskets and washers he wears hanging from some stripes or sewing on his shoulders. I thought at first to use interlining for the stain but after making some trials with the paint directly to the fabric I decided to drop the idea.

First step was making the patterns, I first made the whole thing in paper and then I cut them on the fabric and right after that I just cut several stripes of different sizes and lengths.

Sewing the base of the cosplay wasn't that hard at all and actually I thought it would take me a while but sewing it and adding the sleeves and the stripes barely took me half a day to do it.

Actually it looks like crap in that mannequin... But I hope it gives you a general idea about everything. This is the basic cosplay, the front and the back with all the stripes and metallic parts added.

Right after that I've started thinking about ways of painting the stain, even though my first idea was the acrylic painting I was toying with the idea of other materials such as using spray, or even oil painting. I thought about this for a while but in the end I just tried the spray and the acrylic painting.

The first stain is made with acrylic painting and the black one is made with spray. The acrylic painting looked much better, thicker and especially when you added the letters it looked generally good so I decided to go for it using finally the acrylic part.

The part of drawing the stain was the most stressful for me... My drawing skills are more or less non existent and I was so afraid I was going to fuck up the cosplay with making a horrible stain or anything like that. I made the shape of the stain in paper first and placed where I wanted it, on the chest, the very right and then I just used a pencil to contour it on the fabric. And then I proceeded to paint the stain. Because of the fabric being of cotton it was so porous and I had to use a large amount of paint until it looked opaque as I liked to. I had to wait for longer to the stain to dry completely, so I used two days just for the stain. One for the stain itself and then other one for adding the letters.

As I made with the stain itself I used first a pencil to write down the words and then I painted them with the acrylic painting. I had to do it more or less three times until it looked good enough, because the first time it looked a bit blurry and you couldn't really appreciate what the words were saying.
After that I just waited for it to dry completely and the cosplay was made!!

 So there are two images of the cosplay as it was totally done. I also made a chocker out of fake leather and I added some studs to it to make it somehow similar to the one Toshiya is wearing, ( it's kind of hard to tell how exactly is it because he's wearing different chockers in the live appearances with the outfit and the PV itself so in all honesty I basically... Made it up. )

Again sorry about the poor quality. But here is the final result. I also forgot to say that I added interlining  to the front and the back because the fabric was too translucent and you could see my binding while wearing the cosplay, I've bought a regular soft interlining to add to the front and the back of the outfit so you couldn't really see my body, especially not the binding and the thighs.

I really wanted to do a somehow tutorial of how I styled the wig, the extensions and how I did my make-up but as you can imagine with a BlackBerry there's nothing much I can do. -o-

I'm waiting for some pictures I took in the manga convention, but right now I don't really have much ot the outfit but a few mobile phone pictures I took there. This one is good and it shows almost the entire outfit along with the hair and the make-up so I'm going to leave this here and promise to be back with decent pictures of the outfit when you can see it as it fullest.

....This post took me an hour and a half to write...
Well.

Thanks for reading me~
♡

Making Bodysuits

I get a number of questions on making bodysuits with stretchy materials, so I thought I'd write up a little guide.

1. Make sure you use a stretch stitch!  It allows the seams to stretch without the thread breaking, and it isn't distracting as a top stitch if needed.  Here's my favorite stitch to use:

2. Always use 4-way stretch fabric on every part of the suit!  If you don't some parts could be too tight once fitted, or wrinkle strangely.  Also keep in mind that when sewing a lot of foam pieces on top of a base suit, the suit may become tighter.

3. Invest in a walking foot.  It moves the top and bottom pieces of fabric together, which reduces puckering in stretchy fabrics and vinyl.  It also is fine to use on non-stretch fabrics.

4. For a pattern, I use a zentai suit that I took apart.  If you use this method, use a zentai suit that's a touch larger than needed in case the fabric you use isn't quite as stretchy.

5. If you want to use a mesh overlay, all you have to do is cut the mesh out of the same pattern.  Make sure it's 4-way stretch, or you may not be able to put on your suit!  If you want, you can sew the edges of the mesh and spandex together before putting the suit together, but I find it's not usually necessary.

6.Before adding anything on top of your base suit, make sure you fit it first.

7. If you want raised/padded portions such as on the Old Snake costume, all you need to do is cut the same size of a thin piece of foam and fabric to cover it with, and just top stitch the fabric around the foam onto the suit.  Make sure the fabric is pulled tight!  If you do the reverse of this (foam and fabric on the inside of the suit) you can make a really clean looking muscle suit.  I use the thinnest green foam found at JoAnn's.