Hello and welcome to my wall of fail! Now I love cosplaying when I can, but I will say right now that don't cosplay any one singular anime exclusively.
As of now, here are my past attempts at cosplaying, which have been labeled epic fail by many, including myself. But, as I say, Fail is but a stepping stone to win. So with enough fail, I will eventually make a cosplay that is win.
Now my first ever cosplay was when I was all of ten years old and I cosplayed as Jaws from the James Bond franchise. As it was so long ago, I do not have any pictures of this, so you'll have to take my word for it.
In any case, the first cosplay I do have documented is the character Damon Gant from Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. As it is, I started working on the outfit two months before the convention. Now under normal circumstances, it would be fine. But note that I had never attempted any kind of work with tailoring before in my life and Gant wears a double-breasted suit, which I have heard is one of the hardest things to tailor from scratch. Three days before the convention, I scrapped the suit, went down to the local Big and Tall shop (I am a big guy in real life), bought a hawaiian shirt and some bright orange swimming trunks, dyed the hawaiian shirt orange, and labeled my cosplay "Hawaiian Gant".
Yeah, you can see the fail emanating from this outfit. However, I learned a number of things with this outfit. First and foremost, I am never going with fake facial hair ever again. Either I will go with my own or none at all. Second, If you are working on one of the most difficult things to tailor, make sure you have a clean work space that you know will not be disturbed in order to make absolute sure pieces and instructions do not go missing. Third, Even if a person has supposedly had experience making clothes in the past, even if they are your own parents, refuse their help and very nicely tell them to go away.
In any case, after that, I managed to make one more. It was by far much easier to make, but again, it went to crunch time and some details just had to be dealt with, like how I am not a blond. This is my cosplay of Coop from Megas XLR.
This cosplay was virtually flawless but this is where I learned two key lessons. The first is to make sure you have everything planned out and created well beforehand so you have everything ready at least 10-12 days before a convention. The second is similar to the rule about not allowing parents to assist you with making cosplays and this is not to accept advice from parents about how to style your hair. It was the day before the convention and I needed to bleach my hair in order to look perfect (This was before shaved my beard off or did anything to myself). My mother convinced me that Lemon Juice would work just as well because there was acid in it. It did change the color of my hair. Now it was almost pitch black and my hair smelled of lemons.
In any case, yeah. Those are the only two finished cosplays I have. But I will undoubtedly get better with every piece of fail that I produce until it goes from fail to meh and then from meh to awesome.
In any case, I am working on two cosplays right now. The first is Elizabeth from the anime series Gintama. For a good reason why I chose Elizabeth for those who have never seen Gintama before, here is a video that practically describes why:
teGNok8lYYw
For this cosplay, I opted to make it out of foam so it would be round and have the ability to be clothlike, but also have structure to it as well. I will say right now that this Elizabeth might have to be cubical unless I can find a way to fix that.
The other cosplay I am working on at the moment is Free from the anime series Soul Eater. For those of you who have not seen Soul Eater before, here is the character named Free:
8yPLdno9PEk
This cosplay is pretty much cake for me. The only snag is Free's left eye. No one carries such a contact lens to my knowledge and I have yet to be fitted for contacts by my optometrist and get that nifty slip that I am now, by law, required to have to buy contact lenses of any shape or form.
–-
Then there are cosplays I plan to make at a later date. These include:
Ohara (Beauregard in the 4Kids dub) from Yu-Gi-Oh! GX
Flashman from Megaman II (A long way off right now.)
Furio Tigre from Phoenix Wright: Trials and Tribulations
and finally...
Bartholemew Kuma from One Piece. However, I will be doing the anime/video game version of his coloration, which is black as opposed to the manga's bright orange coloring.
I do appologize in advance if I am not permitted to submit non-One Piece cosplays in this forum, but I just thought that I would on the off chance that it was, in fact, permissible.
