Since my costumes are ready and packed away for Frostbite, the last two weekends we have focused on Yoki’s original character and her costume design. Fuyu Jaw're, the character Yoki chose is from the same storyverse as Sio Imano, a character she dressed as at last year’s Tracon and Neva Imano introduced at Desucon.
Yoki had a clear vision of the costume and the materials when she started the project. Everything had to be “real” looking, in sense on natural materials and no shortcut fastenings with Velcro. When we started to draft out the costume, it felt like making and planning a stage costume rather than a cosplay one. But naturally when there is no character sheet with visual appearance, it had to be created through a back story, personality and values.
Because Yoki has busy, busy study schedule before Frostbite, I'm writing this post from the costume construction on her behalf.
The costume Yoki had created in her mind has actually three to four layers, depending on how they are counted; an under suit with leather tabard, a full length robe, a belt with chain accessories and a capelet with a high collar. The components could be worn in different combinations, like tabard over the robe or the under suit with capelet etc.
The robe is drawn based on the pattern we made for our Snowtrooper dusters with few adjustments. The hem is long with an opening over the left leg. The sleeves are wider and few centimeters longer. The bust is the same, but it fastens with small buckles instead of Velcro. The material is off-white linen with pale blue viscose lining.
The capelet was drawn over basic pattern with two folds on the back. It’s made from dark blue velvet, blue viscose lining with silver pleather trimmings. The capelet fastens with similar buckles as the robe.
The belt has satin band with a metal ring on as a decoration and lacing on the back. The belt is supported with two layers of iron-on interfacing and plastic boning next to the eyelets.
The under suit is just a basic, sleeveless top with two piece “skirt” from dark grey linen. The skirt part is constructed from two separate rectangular shapes, front and back, which attach to each others with small buttons forming one sophisticated loincloth.
The tabard is made from silver fake leather with fabric interfacing and viscose lining. The front is constructed from over 30 individual strips. On the back is lacing with plastic boning. Connecting the front and the back is three bands of pleather on each side.
The wig is silver grey, almost waist length beauty. It doesn’t need styling more than combing, some balsam spray to keep it from tangling and hairspray to set everything so that Yoki won’t have a mental breakdown with all the hovering hair strands.
The base make-up is rather basic; foundation, fixing powder, eye shadow, mascara and eye liner. The turquoise triangles on the temples were painted with Grimas water make-up and fixed with transparent powder. The eyebrows were our major concern. We were worried that we couldn’t get them light enough to match the wig. We thought of using the glue stick- acrylic paint method. because Yoki’s eyebrows are dark. But we had to give up the idea, because we wanted to keep the look natural.
In the end we went with white khol, which actually worked really well. Even if the real color is slightly visible, it fits to the darker shades on the wig. Or then we just happened to have a suitable lighting. At Frostbite the finishing touch will be turquoise contact lenses, which are the same brand as my green ones. So another lens color review coming next month with hopefully loads of photos from the costumes and from Frostbite in general!
