First thing is first... I'm married! Yes, after over a year of being engaged my Fiance and I finally tied the knot only a few weeks ago. Now that that is out of the way I can move onto my blog.
Halloween is upon us, and with only a few days before the big day, everyone is scrambling for a last minute costume to throw together for the season. Sadly, what I am about to share with you probably wont be of any use with so little time, but I figured there's no better time then now to show off how I made my costumes for Dragon Con this year. I'm going to split up the two costumes I created over two different blogs, and so today I want to show you how I went about creating Taurus from "Fairy Tail."
I am known among my cosplay group as someone who tries to create rather large full costumes. Last year I made a Steampunk Darunia costume and late on I created the Phoenix Force costume that I will talk about later on. So, it was difficult for me to see myself in a costume that was so skin tight and revealing. Me being a larger guy, I tend to shy away from revealing too much. Another thing I try to to do when creating costumes is to make them as unique as possible. After a few google searches for previous attempts at Taurus costumes, I was only able to find a few brave souls to try their hand at the character and although valiant, I felt I could try something different. Anyone who has seen "Fairy Tail" knows the character of Taurus is known for being a pervert. It is one of the qualities that made the character so lovable, and so I decided on the funnier side of the character.
To begin the head piece of Taurus I found an old child's Darth Vader mask at the thrift store. It was easy enough to disassemble with the removal of a few screws and straps. Basically, I just needed a frame that fit my head and would act as a starting point for this project. With a dremel tool I removed the lower portions of the mask that would extend far beyond how wide I wanted to mask to be.
Once I had my rough shape I knew I needed to cover the back of my head with something. Thinking about what might work as the cheapest for the project, I resorted to the tried and true cardboard and duct tape. After swinging by my post office for brand new box, I took the the cardboard and began manipulating it till it would give me a nice curvature that would fit around the back of my head and cover my neck. A little bit of duct tape to cover the whole piece was a bit extravagant, but in the end it helped with a large mistake I almost made.
Once the backing was done, I needed a base to use expanding foam on for the sculpt of the face. Expanding foam is one of my guilty pleasures and I had already decided it would be my clay for the nose and cheekbones. I covered some pre-cut pieces of cardboard with some more duct tape and taped them to the front of the nose and expanded the helmet a few inches to allow for the gaping mouth.
Once I had my skeleton done I sprayed the entire headpiece with expanding foam. As I mentioned before, I almost made a huge mistake. What I didn't account for was that I really didn't need to spray the back of the head. It was already flat and the expanding foam, once hardened, didn't stick to the duct tape's surface very well. I ended up peeling and cutting away the back foam and tried to smooth down the eyebrows to create the effect of excitement in the eyes. The nose was a process of just looking off of the image I wanted and carving away until I got the shape I wanted. The rest of the carving was just smoothing the edges.
I decided I wanted an even smoother surface and turned to craft foam as my top layer for the face and head.My hope was to use a hairdryer to mold and shape the surface by heating the foam. This didn't really work well since the expanding foam was so porous. I then resulted in just using hot glue and elbow grease to lay the pieces flat. The difficult part here was to try and keep things even. Even now, you can still see the gaps in between the craft foam pieces. A few of the back pieces I had to go over and make strips to try and fill the larger gaps. I trusted that when I added the black cow spots it would hide some of those areas, which it did.
The next step was creating the extra facial pieces. Easily enough I was able to cut two ears from craft foam and two interior pink pieces. Gravity really gave the ears a nice floppy look. I cut out a rhombus for the nose to give it some depth and a wide nose that would flatten the front of the face a little more. I decided to add the teeth with the mussel as well. Once I hot glued those pieces in place I used a marker to outline the glued on pieces for even more depth and to cover any mistakes I made in cutting the pieces. I took a pink piece of foam and added a tongue and a white strip to create a bottom row of teeth.
I actually tried to make the horns a few different ways at first. I thought that using paper towel role would work, but to get an even better shape, I purchased two 1 inch pvc elbows and pvc glued another piece of piping to the appropriate length. I filled the tube with expanding foam and allowed it to dry, this way I was able to cut the protruding foam flush with the pipe and would later glue these pieces into place with gorilla glue. Hot glue didn't seem to work with expanding foam and craft foam. I took the dremel and just lightly brushed the pvc horns which gave them a nice wood grain like effect in which I implemented into the axe handle I made later.
(This didn't work so well)
The nose ring was actually a ring I bought at home depot in a pack of two. My friend, while using the dremel and protective gloves cut an opening to give the idea it was actually running through his nose. Gorilla glue saw to it that it stayed centered on the face. Finally, the eyes took me the longest to do, and even now, I don't know if it was the best option. Originally, I had found some pink heart glasses which seemed perfect. I replaced the blue lenses for pink ones but it didn't look right since you could see the eye holes behind them very easily. I went searching at the local craft store and found paper mache hearts that were perfect in size. I took some metal wire and pierced some holes in the backs of the hearts which I fed through the eye holes into one another. After a nice paint job, a chopstick gouged into the middle of them for a bridge and getting the wiring done right, they were at a point where I could easily shuffle them around to see out of the small corners and not be afraid of them falling out. The final adjustments I needed for the headpiece was to paint the spots on. To do this, a few passes with permanent marker made it look like a cow.
The body of the costume was merely a muscle zentai suit that I purchased online. I had my wife cut out some black patterns which resembled Taurus' spots and she sowed them on while I wore the suit. If you ever need to sew on something to a zentai suit, make sure to do it while the fabric is stretched out since it shrinks when not worn. The boots I wore and the belt I found were thrift store finds. I realized I needed a tail and I found an old dongle that was used for curtains. I spray painted the end black and fed the remaining cable through a protective sheath that was used for wires under a computer. The sheath gave the right skeleton for the tail. I then sewed a covering to go over the sheath and then attached it to the belt. The front of the belt was just craft foam cut and spray painted the correct colors.
(The zentai suit, pre-patches)
(A few variant shots I took for fun)
The last part of the body merely consisted of some finger-less gloves and some fabric wrappings for the arms. I bought a belt which worked as the strap that went around my chest and that was about it. I later decided to make the axe for Taurus. His axe had always been a staple when he was in the show and I felt even more naked without it. To craft it I gorilla glued 4 pieces of EVA foam squares together. I did this twice for both sides of the axe and proceeded to cut them out in a axe like shape. 4 pieces seemed to do the trick, any less and the axe felt too small. For the handle I had to make it economic for the car ride and wanted to make it into two pieces that would disconnect from each other. I added some screw on pvc elbows to the ends of the handle and the bottom of the axe head, which worked well. I needed to thicken the middle of the axe head and so I split a pool noodle made of foam and spray painted it after cutting it to a point at the tip. The final touches included making a cardboard stencil for the symbol and then a wrapping for the axe handle at the base, and the rest is history.
I really hoped you enjoyed this little insight as to how I made my Taurus costume. If you have any questions or comments about it, I would love to hear your thoughts. You can visit my facebook page by clicking the image below and be sure to give it a follow to keep up with my next blog.
