New X-23 pictures

Today I have a few more photos of X-23, taken before Halloween at a party. They are a little brighter than your average con pics.

A costume like this gets easier to wear each time you do it. The first time you put on a costume there’s always those problems that spring up after an hour or so of walking around in it. With this costume it was the copious amounts of hair in front of my and the talons on my feet. The talons were so cumbersome that I actually took them off within the first few minutes at Connecticon, and I will probably never reattach them except for a picture someday.

To solve the hair problem without thinning the wig I actually pinned a little back for this party. You can’t really tell that the hair is pinned how it is, but there’s a huge difference in the amount of hair falling in my face and over my shoulders here as compared to CTcon.

I would like to wear this costume to a con again soon because I feel so cool in it. Maybe Anime Boston???

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Bonus X-23 & the X-men Photos

Here’s a treat; some bonus X-23 & X-men photos not included in our photographer’s original photo-shoot upload picks. I selected and color corrected these photos myself for your entertainment. I think we still look pretty cool in these photos, so why not share them?

Thanks for reading!

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X-Men Photoshoot, Connecticon 2011

Finally, the photos from the X-men shoot from Connecticon 2011 are here. I’d like to thank Christina Colon for photographing us in our costumes.

So our X-men cosplay group started off with just Cyclops, Mystique, X-23, and Sabertooth. But along the way we picked up a Nightcrawler and Rogue.

This is me in my Laura Kinney cosplay, a.k.a. X-23 as seen in Marvel vs. Capcom 3

This is Kelley as Mystique. It took us about two hours to paint her blue.

This is Ryan, whose oversized coat and shoulder pads make him look a lot scarier than he is. Though that is his real hair.

Finally, Lou played Cyclops with a light-up LED visor.

Here are the mutants with an edge.

My talons were carved from pine wood and riveted to detachable Velcro gloves which I made for the sole purpose of mounting these things to my hands.

And here are the all around good guys, the X-men.

Next, we pretended to fight.

What is a super hero photoshoot without a few action shots?

It was a good time.

My costume is made almost entirely out of PVC. You can read more about how I constructed it on the X-23 page.

I had made talons for my feet, but they were so hard to walk in, I took them off almost immediately.

Ryan (Sabertooth) is sporting some pretty snazzy fake nails which he sharpened and painted himself.

A little photoshop for dramatic effect: this photo manipulation done by Christina Colon

Here is a shot of Cyclop’s light up visor.

One of the toughest part of playing a bad guy is trying not to smile in pictures!

At the end of the day, we all had a great time cosplaying from the X-men, and hope to wear the costumes again soon.

Thanks for reading!

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Soon To Come….X-23 cosplay page

Photo by Jack Parra

The full X-23 Cosplay page and X-Men Photoshoot are on the way.

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Polyester Resin for Cosplay

My costume for Connecticon requires that I make some really sturdy, metallic looking hand accessories. I’ll just tell you now, I’m Cosplaying as X-23 from the X-men, and I need to make four adamantium claws. I decided to try my hand at resin casting, because my Boyfriend made a sword with resin with AMAZING results. I thought, claws are a lot smaller, so they’ll be a lot easier, right?

 

We started with four pine wood stakes. My boyfriend sanded them into rough claw shapes with his fancy dremel, then left me to do the casting myself. The idea was to coat the wooden claws in a thick layer of resin, and then re-sand them down to a perfectly smooth, non-pourous paintable surface, capable of obtaining a high-gloss finish. I choose Polyester resin, because it was conveniently located at A.C. Moore. I thought, if it’s in a craft store, it must be more user friendly than the versions at a hardware store, right? Not so.

Boyfriend and I with beautifully crafted resin sword

Before I began my casting, I got a book from the Library, “Casting for Crafters” which give detailed instructions on a number of casting methods and projects. This is an excellent book, and I would recommend it to anything who is thinking about casting in Polyester or Epoxy resin.

This book informed me that my Polyester resin, while very beautiful and bubble free, is very toxic and gives off some pretty nasty fumes. So I decided that I needed to take some extra precautions, but I wasn’t going to let the word “fumes” scare me away from the project all together. I am after all a painter, and Gamsol gives off some pretty strong vapors and I survived those just fine.

So I set up my work area outside, with pre-measures cups and mixing sticks and my wax paper. I laid out my claws, put on my mask, goggles, and gloves, and pried open the resin container.

What a smell. I felt like my mask did nothing to filter out the mind-spinning vapors. I mixed and poured my resin rather quickly, taking frequent breaths of air several feet away from my project. It was incredibly messy. The top of the resin container was not meant for pouring, it seems, and resin spilled all over the side of the can. This just created more fumes. By the time I had everything under control I felt sick.

The labels on the container are down-right scary. This stuff causes blindness, can stop your breathing, if you ingest it you’re pretty much dead, and too much exposure can cause depression of the nervous system. Did I also mention that it can burn you from coming in contact with your skin? Honestly, if the pour was simple and easy to control, I wouldn’t have that much of a problem with the scary warning labels. It’s the fact that the stuff is so messy that scares me. You don’t know what the resin is going to get on. There could be poison on any surface! I am a very neat and orderly individual, and I feel like I took every reasonable precaution to get my materials all organized and ready to go before I began the casting. But still, I felt like I was making too much of a mess to make playing with deadly liquid plastic worth it.

I don’t know how the claws have come out yet; they aren’t fully cured. I’m sure that they will look fine because resin really does look awesome.

I don’t know either if I will attempt casting again. It would be a shame to waste all the supplies I got together. I wanted to make all sorts of things. But what is more important? Putting dead flowers inside a glass paperweight, or keeping my braincells? We’ll see how my claws come out.

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