What better way to kick-start this blog than with a throwback Thursday to my first ever cosplay??
I've wanted to make my own Spider-Man costume since I was a kid and in the summer of 2018 that wish finally came true (although some - myself included - would argue that I should've outgrown that wish several years ago!🤣) Because I was totally new to the world of cosplay and I had no idea how much - if any - use the finished suit would get, I set myself an extremely tight budget and managed to complete it in just under than 2 months.
I'll warn you, this post will be quite long-winded but I've also made it picture heavy so as not to be too boring (fingers crossed!🤣)
Most of these images have been taken from a thread that I created on TheRPF.com back when I was still working on this, and later reposted onto my Instagram story, because those were the only WIP photos that I could find.
After buying a plain sleeveless hoodie to use as a base, the next thing I needed to do was design my costume! I'm hopeless at drawing, so I just used an app on my phone to edit a spider and some web lines onto a photo of the hoodie.
I was really happy with how this turned out, so it was time to start working on the actual costume!
For the front spider, I decided to use the logo from the Spider-Man PS4 game, because after scrolling through a ton of spider symbols on Google this was my favourite!
I printed out a template for one half of the symbol, then taped it onto a piece of scrap fabric (which came from an old t-shirt because I was on an extremely tight budget at the time and this was a free source of fabric.)
The reason for the tape is that it helps to make the fabric stiff, which stops it from twisting and stretching as you try to cut it. Ultimately, this made it so much easier to cut around the paper template accurately.
Rinse and repeat until you have 2 matching spider halves!
To attach the spider to the hoodie, I used small amounts of fabric glue to hold the body and each of the legs in place while I sewed around all of the edges.
In hindsight, I definitely would have forgotten about the sewing and just used glue for the entire process. The sewing literally took days to do by hand and trust me, it doe not look pretty!🤣 BUT, I did learn a valuable new skill, so silver linings and all that.
Compared to the spider symbol, the web lines were a piece of cake! I just used a fabric marker and a ruler to draw them on in about 10 minutes.
By the time it came to adding the back spider, I had learned my lesson! I made this using the same process as the front spider but instead of sewing it into place I used fabric glue. This only took half an hour to do and looks a million times neater IMO! For the design of the back symbol, I was instantly drawn to the one used on the Civil War prototype suit that was replaced with CGI to give the suit that we all know and love from the movie. An awesome DeviantArt user by the name of redknightz01 had created a template for the symbol (link here) and they very kindly gave me permission to print it out and use it for my suit!
With all of the design work completed, I had to break out the sewing kit once more to take the hoodie in. It was far too baggy and just looked awful IMO.
I think I ended up removing about 6 inches of fabric altogether, but I'm much happier with it now! The black "undersuit" is simply a pair of jogging bottoms and a long-sleeved t shirt (complete with thumb holes!)
Main costume complete, it was time to start working on the mask!
The first thing I did was create a faceshell using cardboard and paper mache, but it ended up being too big so I never used it. I really like the eyes on the Amazing Spider-Man 2 suit, so I sketched out a template for these and traced them onto thin cereal box card (which is my material of choice for about 99% of my projects!😅)
I then built these up with more layers until they were around 2 mm thick before adding more strips of cardboard to the inside of the eyes to recreate that shutter effect from the MCU suits. Since I was going for a Miles Morales vibe with the mask, I painted the frames with cherry red acrylic paint.
I wanted something more unique than the traditional white eyes of the movies and comic books, so I bought some stainless steel mesh and set to work.
Each lens is made up of 3 layers of mesh, each one offset at a different angle to make them impossible to see through (but because of how close they sit to my face, the visibility is still really good!) I also painted the middle layer of mesh black as this absorbs any light that gets reflected off the shiny metal and stops it from blinding me whenever I go out into the sun! 🤣
I then just glued the eyes to the mask with some plain old craft glue! I'm honestly surprised that this even worked in the first place, let alone held up for as long as it has.
And this is where the face shell really came in handy! I stretched the mask out over the shell to keep the fabric in place while I added the web lines with metallic silver puffy paint.
Like everything else about this cosplay, it's far from perfect but for my first time puffy painting I was really happy with the result!
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| (You can see that I also created a pair of custom web shooters for the costume, but I've already rambled on for long enough so I'll save those for another day 😜) |
If you managed to make it this far, thank you so much! This post ended up being wayyyy longer than I had anticipated but making this costume was a relatively long process and I wanted to document as much of it as possible.
As I've mentioned a few times now, there are plenty of things I could have done differently or more neatly but at the end of the day I'm still so happy with how this turned out! I've officially retired the suit from use in favour of the bigger and better things that are coming in 2020, but it still hangs pride-of-place in my wardrobe and probably will for many years to come. I learned so many awesome new skills while working on this project that will no doubt continue to serve me for pretty much every cosplay that I make in the future!
Thanks for reading!
Until next time,
- Terabyte
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