XVIII Saló del Manga

The Salón del Manga is probably by now one of the most important Manga conventions in Spain. In fact this year it had set a record of assistants. More than 100.000 people attended the convention.
This year they changed the venue, which I think that it was the main reason of more people attending. La Fira is much bigger than the previous place and it gave more room for basically everything.

As a curious note it has been 20 years since the first Dragon Ball volume got published in Spain and on Thursday it was settled the new Guinness Record of more people dressed up as characters from the Manga. I missed it because I didn't go to the convention that day, but I would have killed for seeing so many people gathered together as different people from Dragon Ball!

The main theme of the convention this year, pretty much for my enjoyment and my love towards Japanese food, was the food and cooking. There was an exhibition about the relationship between Manga and food, with different Mangas which main theme were food, even some barely dedicated to ramen, or just drinks.

The level of cosplay this year was... Weird. I might be wrong but I think that less people were cosplayed, but truth is the level was good. There were a lot of good cosplays, especially on Saturday which was the day of the Cosplay World Summit but even the Sunday which was the last day and it was prone to have less people dress up, there was a lot of good cosplayers.

There was also an exhibition of cosplays which won either the Cosplay Summit or the Yamato competitions. From cosplayers either from Spain or from other countries. Some of the cosplayed dispayed were absolutely impressive to see in real life and you could see why they would have won a prize or win a Cosplay competition.

 

( the exhitions of the cosplays that won summit competitions and yamatos.
some were really impressive in real life.)

 ( and the small exposition about manga and food. )


Okay, day by day...
Lots of pictures are coming, so sorry~
FRIDAY
First day I attended the Con, in my Toshiya Macabre Tour cosplay (an entry about it is coming soon I do promise.) We arrived around 3pm and the place wasn't really crowded so it gives us some chances to just look around and get accostumed to the new place, which was enormous, and just take a general look of what the new place looked like.

I didn't see many cosplayers the first day, but I took a few pics in general.

This was only one part of the whole corner of Japanese food located at one side of the Convention Venue. There was around six or seven Japanese related restaurants which offered things such as Curry, Ramen, Onigiris or Dorayakis.
There was even a place which offered Japanese crepes and another one which made Matcha Latte.
( I've bought one and it tasted like heaven o(≧▽≦)o )

The onigiris were a bit expensive, but they tasted amazingly.

I didn't find many good cosplayers that day. But the group on the right? I was highly impressed by them!! I loved that Sherlock Holmes Anime show when I was a little kid, back in the day when I had no idea what Anime was. Their costumes were amazing and they have made the dog's faces out of papier maché so they couldn't speak but the way they acted and posed for the pictures was amazing. They also attended the Sunday, I think. And believe it was a pleasure to see them around. I wish there was more people doing older Anime cosplays.

 ( this picture sums up my absolutely happiness at the fact there was a lot of Japanese food to buy inside of the con. )

After that we came back home, I was staying in a friend's house and he made some amazing curry. If you think by now that all I do in Barcelona/Manga con is eating, then you're absolutely right.

SATURDAY
Was the main day of the Convention. It was the day were the World Summit competition was held, so it was extremely crowded and filled with a lot of cosplayers.

We arrived around two pm and the queue to either buy tickets to get inside and then the queue to get inside the venue was INSANE. And when I say insane I meant that the queue was probably a good 500 metres long? It lasted from the convention door to the square where the Subway was placed, absolutely insane.

 ( I don't know if you can appreciate it, but that line of people was the queue. )

It was visibly more crowded than the day before, but it was completely understandable since it was Saturday, the most important day and with the Summit happening. We gathered something to eat and then we claimed a sit to be able to watch the whole competition. This year I was surprised by the little amount of people inscribed. Usually it's around 40, but in the end it was barely... 18? I can be wrong about the specific number but there weren't more than 20, that's for sure.

I wasn't close to the stage, so I didn't take pictures or videos of the whole competition but I will share my favourite performance I found in a youtube video.

I didn't play Final Fantasy VI so I didn't know the characters but I can say, hand over heart, that it was the most impressive performance out of the whole competition. They didn't win! Which was a big shock for me, but I can say they were my most favourite of them all.

I've spent the rest of the evening buying Manga volumes for closing my unfinished collections, eating haha~ and taking pictures of impressive cosplayers!

I went to the con that day with my Ciel Drama CD cover cosplay (an entry about it will come soon as well, I promise.) I don't think a lot of people recognised me but I had fun wearing it, and I think it was really accurate and looked good, so that's all I need.

( waiting for the summit to start, i can't tell how many of these i've bought the whole weekend. )

 These girls participated in the Summit as well, the girl of the left's sword broke in the middle of the performance, it was such a pity!

  ( I'm so sad the picture didn't turn out well. She was amazing! ╥﹏╥ )

 

 Yes, more food. We went to a Japanese restaurant after we left the con, and then we went to eat some frozen yoghurt for dessert.

SUNDAY

The last day of the con. Since past year I decided that I would go to the last day of the Barcelona's Manga convention in a really comfortable cosplay, so I could spend all day, walking around the stalls and shops and buying things either for me and for my friends.
This year I went as Ritsuka in his allovers look, basically something comfortable to be able to eat walk around and shop.

( best picture of myself from that day~ )

Surprisingly for being the last day and a Sunday, there was a lot of people wearing really good cosplays.

( all the food we ordered. )

 ( my favourites, i love utapri cos when it's good!! )

 

Later the evening there was a decorative sushi talk and presentation by a Japanese chef from a restaurant in Barcelona. I wasn't close to where they were so my pictures aren't really good, but it was amazing the things he did with slices of fish or leaves of bamboo.

 

( yeah he actually cut that into a leaf, i was amazed. )

We stayed until there were barely fifteen minutes to close the venue, and then we leave to a really cheap chinese restaurant to close the whole day with even more food.

 

( i look at it now and get hungrydfjdf. )

Even though it looks like all I did was eating, I really had fun. The new venue is bigger and spacious and all the events organized looked good. Even with the queues and the amount of people who attended you didn't feel annoyed or overwhelmed and the space was well distributed.

Basically I can't wait for next year and come back, so Barcelona, until I see you again~

 

Thanks for reading me~

♡♡♡♡

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~
♡