R and J Cosplay: Making Hawke

For PAX East this year, I decided to make a Rogue version of Hawke from Dragon Age 2. Bill (www.punishedprops.com) already had a mage version of Hawke and we thought that the twin thing would play well if we did different classes of the same character. It was pretty easy to get references images for the costume. Just took some screenies of Hawke in all his glory.

The camera was a little tricky. I had to switch to Varric to see my character's feet. #dwarvesareshort

Soooooooooooooo off to JoJoFab's we go.

I got vinyl in two different color for all of the leather bits of the costume. I also found some nice thermal type shirts in the right color. The red pants were a more difficult find. Bon Ton had some in the ladies section. This wasn't a problem, as I have no shame about buy lady pants in a size 14. (what does 14 meeeeeeeean??)

After my mage costume from last year, you would have thought that Jaimi and I would have invested in a decent sewing machine. Sooooo, between our lame machine, my mother's, and one I borrowed from our Home Ec. teacher at my school, I got the sewing done. /queuerockymontage

I will add that A LOT of this was also done by hand. (Anyone else every stab yourself with the backside of the needle?)

Jaimi had a jig for making all of the "buckles."

Tigger is our pincushion. Somewhere out there, the real Tigger is in AGONY!!!

Mass Effect break!! A large portion of this project was done while dogsitting (and catsitting) for Jaimi's ma.

The bird skulls were made of skulpy by Jaimi and my mom the art teacher.

THE ARMOR BITS. We took a trip out to Seattle to visit my brother. I part of our week out there to learn about working with PVC Foam. (also called Sintra) The basic steps for building the pieces were:
1. Measure and cut the pieces to fit
2. Heat pieces with the heat gun (don't burn...toxic gas)
3. Mold the pieces to fit
4. Saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand 100 grit
5. Bondo and saaaaaaaaaaaaaaand 100 grit
6. Fill/sand/primer/sand/primer again/sand
7. Aluminum paint
8. Matte clear coat
9. black acrylic and paper towels for weathering
10. clearcoat between layers of weathering
11. Burnt sienna acrylic for the rust

For all of my armor pieces I also added blood. DA2 has it in excess. I watered down some red paint, took the pieces out to the "sky lounge," and squirted them all to hell with "blood." This was probably the most fun part of this entire project.

The results:

The gloves/claws were also fun/tedious to make. I cut a ton of quadrilaterals from sintra and epoxied them into 90° wedges. Then I gave them the same treatment as the armor pieces and epoxied them to some cheap gloves.

The sash was sewn from a rough linen. All of the vinyl was given some acrylic paint for weathering. The cloth was dunked in dirty water (paint) to dull the bright colors. The armor was put in place with a combination of epoxy and industrial strength velcro. The boots came from wal mart.

The daggers were crafted from three layers of sintra, sandwiched and epoxied. Then I did the dremel thing and repeated the same process as with the armor. Including the blood.