Step-by-step cosplay

Here I am, back again.

So. For GamesCom I made myself a humanoid twilight dragon from WoW. 

A small background information for all those who don't play World of Warcraft: There are five big dragonflights that are all important for something. There's the bronze Dragonflight which is responsible for time/timetravel. The green Dragonflight, which are the dragons of life and of the druids. The blue dragons are the keepers of magic and the black dragons are descendants of the earthwarden Neltharion (who was driven insane by the old gods, which are similiar to Cthulhu).
Now these are just the dragonflights. There's the protodrakes, which are the ancestors of the dragons, and the so called netherdrakes. Netherdrakes and blue dragons were bred in an experiment by the black dragons and thus, the insane twilight drakes were born.

They're dark-blue/pink-purple/silver-black and I tried to work it all into my cosplay.

So first off, I only made the horns, the pauldrons and the makeup myself. 

Disclaimer: The way I made these horns wasn't ideal at all. I actually threw them away right after the convention due to the spray paint peeling off.

I started with doing the horns. 

First step: The base

For the horns I bought a plastic hairband, wire and spraypaint.

I hot-glued the wire onto the hairband and brought them into the rough shape I wanted the horns to have later. Once I was sure that they were stuck in place, I started to wrap some newspaper around them. I actually used two or three layers. To keep the newspaper in place, I used rubberbands. 

Once that was done, I grabbed some clingfoil and wrapped it all up in it. again, I held it in place with more rubber bands. But after four or five layers of clingfoil, it stuck by itself and I didn't need anymore rubber bands (not like I had any left anyway ^^" )

I tried them on for test and was actually pretty content that they already looked like horns.

To give them more texture, I went and bought some garden wire and wrapped them around the horns, creating spikes at the end of them.

All in all, they looked like ram horns and I was rather happy about it. 

Second step: Spray painting

I bought glittering blue spray paint as well as matte black spray paint. I held the horns onto the hairband and just started spraying quite a few layers (I'd advise using gloves. I didn't. Bad idea tbh)

I liked the way they looked afterwards, there were nice colour gradients and I just loved it.

 

First try on after they were basically done and - what can I say - they actually looked like horns!

Step three: Make-up

So, for my entire outfit, I ordered a corsage and a pair of leggings online. Since they didn't arrive just yet, I decided to try out my make-up first, as well as the look of the contact lenses. I need to tell you there that most humanoid forms of dragons are high-elves/night-elves or half-elves which is why I went for the coloured eyebrow look. I didn't want to go too much and over the top with the make-up, so I just contured my face with the characteristic colourscheme of twilight drakes and put the focus on/around my eyes.

Step four: putting the outfit together

Finally my orders arrived! I've also been to the hairdresser by then to get my head even more colourful. Now, the EVA foam I used to make my pauldrons arrived as well, but I didn't know how to do them yet, so I just wanted to see the way the outfit looked all in all.

I actually put on some make-up for this picture as well, but unfortunately I was dumb and thought I could put in the contact lenses AFTER putting on make-up. (Bad idea, made me look like Alice Cooper with sleep-deprivation because my eyes teared up so bad that I started crying thanks to the lenses)

Step five: Pauldrons

As stated before, I used EVA foam to create my pauldrons. I also used around 1,5m of feathers, some more feathers, even more feathers, spray paint and a shit-ton of hot glue.

Before I started doing the pauldrons, I looked through the appearance roster in World of Warcraft to find a simple pair of shoulder armour. 

I freehandedly traced the pattern on a piece of cardboard and cut out a smaller piece because, well, I made two overlapping pauldrons. Once I cut the shape from the cardboard, I traced it onto the EVA foam. I cut it out and went to get a heat gun to shape the EVA foam in place. 

Once they were in the right shape to fit on my shoulders, I grabbed the smaller piece of the cardboard cutout and used it as a template to give the pauldrons a black edge and a blue base.

After the spraypaint had drie, I grabbed my feathers and the hot glue gun. 

I cut the band into smaller pieces and hot glued them onto the inside of the pauldrons until I was all the way around. Then I simply glued the smaller pauldron onto the bigger in the angle I wanted them and voilà, my pauldrons were done and not nearly as hard as I imagined them to be.

Last step: the convention

I wore my cosplay on the second day I was at the convention and... well, I was taken abback by all the attention I gained. A ton of people wanted to take pictures of/with me, even though I don't think they had any clue of what I was supposed to be.

Once my day there was over, I had dried pieces of spraypaint all over me which was the reason that my horns landed right inside the trash once I exited the convention. But apart from that, the whole thing looked surprisingly great.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this post. I'll work on my writing to improve it.

Enjoy this picture of me in cosplay and have a good day/night.