Box File Spellbooks!

So here I am, being more Chinese than usual, cosplaying a character from a China mobile MOBA and whatnot.

安琪拉 is my favourite hero from 王者荣耀. When I first started playing the game, I had no idea who to pick and didn't notice that the timer has finished ticking. I was then given a random hero. Guess who I got? ;)

Photo by Uncredited

Then I fell in love immediately.

Long story short, I spam pick her whenever I can. I yolo-ed and decided to cosplay her. Yes, I absolutely have to cosplay all my waifus.

ANYWAY. This blog spot isn't to tell you how much I love 安琪拉 or how I came to deciding on cosplaying her (though I think I did just that XD), it is to show you how to turn an old box file, into a spellbook for 安琪拉!

You can make this for your own 安琪拉 cosplay, make it for keepsakes if you're a fan of 王者荣耀, or simply use it as a reference to make a spellbook for another character.

Materials:

- Box file

- 1mm/2mm EVA foam

- Hot glue, super glue

- Acrylic paint *you'll need to paint each part before assembly

- Primer / lacquer (depending on your propmaking habit/preference)

Firstly, you'll need an old file, where you need to strip off / tear off / cut off this part:

...Leaving you with this sad shell... hahaha.

Measure your box file, trace your measurements onto your EVA foam. Using hot glue (or whatever glue you prefer to work with), cover your box file with the EVA foam. Cut strips of EVA foam to cover all sides.

Paint the base red and the edges black.

You'll then need to make 2 shuriken-looking thing that looks like this:

Paint the base black and the sides silver. Stick it on both sides of the book. Add the book borders by cutting a piece of foam that looks like this: 

Make sure it fits and covers both sides nicely! Then, paint it black, weather it and give it some depth, before attaching it to the book.

Add 2 silver rectangles on the spine.

Didn't take a photo of the parts before they were painted :( but this photo should give you an idea of how it is supposed to look like.

Then, let the Eye of Sauron gaze upon your soul.

No? Ok.

Measure a circle with diameter of approximately 13cm. Paint it. 

Start with yellow, start from the center, paint the entire piece. Next, with orange, paint a ring with inner diameter of approximately 6cm, and outer diameter of approximately 10cm. Make sure all the shades blend together well so they don't look like a lollipop (?) //wut.

Paint a slit of approximately 1~1.5cm thick, with the 2 edges slowly becoming sharper and fading out slightly. Outline it slightly with black paint. Blend it so it is almost unnoticeable.

Make a dorayaki because you must be hungry by now!

Cut another piece of foam of the same diameter as the first. Wedge a piece of foam of approximately 1~1.5cm thick in the center and stick the edges of the 2 circles together with super glue.

What kind of dorayaki has foam filling??

Cut a long strip of foam and stick it along the sides. I cut mine about 1cm thick. The length should be the circumference of your dorayaki circle.

Paint it silver, weather with black paint, and you'll get something like this:

Make spears out of foam! Make 2 large spears and 2 small spears, once again, paint them before attaching. Don't really know how to put it in words but I hope the pictures below help.

Stick that speared eye of Sauron onto your spell book. Coat the entire book with clear lacquer or whatever you use to coat your props normally. And you're done~

You can use this guide aptly to recreate other spellbooks by changing out the details. Of course, there are many other ways to make a spellbook props. But if you ever need a large one, or running short on time, this is a simple way that you can refer to.

Hope it was helpful to you~ :D

The making of Windranger's Bow of the Sun Vine

First of all, this is not a detailed tutorial. It's just a very simple guide. If you already have basic knowledge in prop-making this should be a piece of cake for you. It should be helpful in giving you an idea of how to form your bow (regardless of whether it's this bow or some other bows) especially if you plan to make it travel-friendly.

Can't make this a very detailed guide cause I didn't really take enough photos. Plus, this was a very rushed work for a cosplay appearance job recently so I would say it's not exactly my best work (don't wanna teach you crappy work hehe). I completed this whole bow from planning to finished product in 2 nights (collectively probably 7-8 hours). Only had time to do it after I get home from my day job.

So. First of all...
To make awesome props, you need a Propmaker Dog.

My very own Propmaker Dog, Mystie. Here you can see her tracing the pattern onto EVA foam.

*She the one who makes all my cosplay props!

Okay just kidding.

First you'll need to construct both sides of the bow.

I made both sides separately so that it is easier to pack for conventions/travelling. They are connected by a pipe connector in the center.

Paint them, shade them.. don't forget the details!

Assemble it and wrap brown PU leather around the handle.

Done~

Making Fake Blood

Ever needed to make fake blood for your cosplays, parties or whatever reason? (For making a dead chicken, check out this tutorial!) Here's a recipe I'd like to share!

Short backstory: I actually looked up the internet for recipes but a lot of the ingredients cannot be easily found in Malaysia. I was rushing for time as this dead chicken was an event prop that I needed the next day. Gathering whatever info there was on the internet and after identifying a few key ingredients, I came up with this! Super cheap and easy to make!

What you'll need:
- red food colouring
- cocoa powder
- water

First, get a container (disposable cause I don't think it will be sunshine and butterflies to wash this thing after lol) and a plastic spoon (disposable preferably, for the same reason).

Scoop about 3-4 spoonfuls of cocoa powder into the container. Pour the entire bottle (25ml) of red food colouring into the mix, and add 1.5 parts of water.

Mix gently with the spoon. It might be hard to melt the cocoa powder so you can choose to use warm water instead of regular tap water.

 Adjust according to your needs. If you need more diluted blood, put more water. If you need more concentrated blood, put less water. If you need clumpy blood, you can try adding corn starch. :D

Once it's well mixed, you should see something like the above. Now you can paint it onto your props and/or costumes. It's perfectly safe and edible too, since ingredients used are all food items.

That's all~ Have fun!

Dead chicken and how to get one

Inside a crocodile cage...

Have you ever needed a dead chicken that doesn't smell, doesn't rot and doesn't attract flies? Probably not. But well, I'm gonna teach you how to get (make) one anyway. XD

*I'm too lazy to adjust the lightings/crop and add watermark for every picture..so please bear with me if the pictures aren't as nice as you'd expect.. and please do not steal the pics! If you do use it/share this guide, do credit me by linking back to my blog or FB page: Catnipx

You'll need
- Newspaper
- Tape
- Hot glue stick
- Hot glue gun
- Feathers
- Paint
- Fake blood

Base

Get old newspaper. Roll them into 1 large ball (body), 1 medium ball (cut-off head), and 1 small ball (tail). Tape them together in place, Wrap the connecting areas with newspaper until you get this chicken shape:

Broken neck

This is just the base coat before attaching the feathers (you'll need to add more details later on).

Paint the 'broken neck' area using red acrylic paint. Make sure the paint is thick and consistent, and the newspaper printings are properly covered. Using brown and black acrylic, shade the rim of the circle. With white, paint a small circle in the center of the neck area. Allow it to dry.

Feathers

Get your hands on some good ol' feather dusters! This part is fun because you will need to pull out all the feathers. XD Depending on how big you made your chicken body to be, prepare enough loose feathers to be stuck onto the chicken. Try to stick them in rows - you can arrange and stick them on a long piece of tape before securing it onto the base.

Stick feathers all the way up to the neck area. Arrange them as closely as possible and you should have something like this:

Bloody details

Draw blood! Here's where we make things gory. 

Apply fake blood gently with a brush onto the stems of the feathers, all around the neck area. Acrylic is not recommended here as its consistency will make it look less like real, fresh blood.

Chicken feet

*This was where I started realizing that I need to take more photos if I were to make a tutorial. So from here on, more visuals! :D

First, you'll need to bend a few pieces of wire like so, to make the structure of the feet.

Stick them together and wrap stone clay/paper clay around them. Be generous! Make sure all edges (especially sharp points) are properly wrapped in clay.

Once you're done, leave them to dry. You can add on details like the claws/nails by using a toothpick to lightly scratch a line slightly below the tip.

Paint them!

Shade them so that they look more convincing! Then, leave them to dry.

Attach the feet onto the body of the chicken by poking them into the body (LOL sounds cruel). Secure it with hot glue. And ta-da!!!

Alternatively, you can add extra details like injured patches on other parts of the body.

 And that's it! A dead chicken that doesn't smell, doesn't rot and doesn't attract flies ;)

Hope you enjoyed this tutorial you'll probably never ever use.

Foam bird skull poof poof poof

It's been awhile! Well, it's always like this, me coming here and trying to be active and then get distracted and ended up not updating for a long time. Rinse and repeat. XD Well, I'm back now, so. I'm gonna share a tutorial on how to make bird skull (?) !!! But before that, let me talk a little about my Comic Fiesta 2016. Very briefly, I promise.

I'm feeling rather high and cheerful recently, maybe because I've had an awesome CF to end the year with! The day before CF, I did a group pool party photoshoot with my D2MC family. I LOVE THEM TO BITS! I will update on this later on when I have more photos from the photographers..so stay tuned to my Faccebook page: Catnipx 喵喵草 for the photos!

Then on the first day of CF, I cosplayed as Meepo! Along with Sharon, Hui Min, Desi and Grace, we were the first ever Meepo girls group in Malaysia~ I don't wanna brag but I think we were super cute together lololol~ (Once again, photos will be posted to my Facebook page so please like and follow me there!) We did the Bone Ruins set. This set features a bird skull strapped onto the right shoulder of Meepo, like this:

And this post will be a tutorial on the various techniques involved to make this bird skull. I'll be sharing techniques which is applicable for different projects, not just making a bird skull, so you can also use parts of this guide as a reference for other props where applicable.

I'm a Meepo girl owo

Step 1: Materials
Ideally, you would need a foam ball of the right size - I used an 8cm diameter styrofoam ball. For the beaks, cut out EVA foam pieces as seen in the picture. The length I went with was 12cm (on the slightly longer side), where the width of each piece (at the widest point) is 5cm.

 *You can see pieces of tape over the middle of the styrofoam ball in my picture because I'm recycling 2 pieces of old foam domes. This is another option that you can go with if you can't find a full sphere. For Malaysians, you can find styrofoam balls and domes at Art Friend in MidValley.

Step 2: Assembly
I wish I took more pictures in between, argh! Anyway...
Mark your foam ball in the center, draw a line across. Think of where you want to position your eyes, mark them on the ball. Mark a line for where the beak should sit.
Glue the 2 pieces of EVA foam together at the longer side, forming a V shape. Glue the non-pointy part to the styrofoam ball, according to where you initially intended the beak to sit.

pinoy lighter putang ina mo bobo? :3

Step 3: Hollowing out the eyes, skull contouring (wut?)
As seen in the picture above, the eye sockets are hollowed out. To do this, simply burn the styrofoam with a lighter where the eye sockets are supposed to be. *You may want to be careful and not breath in the fumes because its hazardous! Be careful as it should burn pretty quickly. Try to minimize mistakes as more mistakes will lead to you having to do more work patching up later.
Since skulls are not supposed to be round and full, you would need to reduce the roundness at the bottom too. Below each eye/under each side of the beak, use the lighter to lightly reduce the roundness (BURN AWAY THOSE FATS LOL). Try to make it even for both sides.

Step 4: Patching up
This step is especially important if you used 2 domes instead of a complete sphere like me. There are bound to be gaps in between the 2 domes, patch them up with putty.

tub of putty

Fill the gaps and holes in between the parts, then smoothen it out. Personal advice: use your fingers instead of the spread thingy for tricky parts! This is also the time to patch up those extra holes that you have accidentally burnt (if you did).

Step 5: Adding more details
Lightly sketch where the nostrils should be. Cut a super thin strip of EVA foam, stick it securely around where the nostrils are supposed to be. Do the same for the eye sockets.

Add more putty if you wish, where you deem appropriate.

Step 6: Drying it out
Let the putty on your bird skull dry and harden completely under the sun.
Once it's dried, you would need to coat the whole thing with layers of diluted PVA glue/wood glue. Different concentration of glue can be used but I typically go with 1:1.5; wood glue:water. If it's more diluted, coat more layers. *Wait for each layer to dry before coating the next!

Sunbathing birb

Step 7: Spray painting, shading/weathering
Once your entire bird skull is covered properly with layers of glue and dried, spray the whole skull white. *Make sure it's properly covered with glue! Otherwise the acrylic spray paint will very likely burn into your styrofoam!

Paint the eye sockets and nostrils black. Shade/weather the sides with grey or very diluted black paint. Try to make it look as natural and convincing as possible (don't be too neat!)

And done~ Hope the guide for detailed and clear enough! Feel free to leave a comment or PM me on my Facebook page if you are unclear about anything.

❤ Catnipx ❤

Overwatch dolls~

I don't play Overwatch, actually. Sure wish I do, though. But I suffer from motion sickness and I just thought spending 60USD that I do not have for something that I might not be able to enjoy long at all might not exactly be worthwhile. Still. I really like the character designs and the game seems fun! Maybe I'll try it soon with someone else's account huehue.

Anyway, a friend commissioned me to make these~

D.Va and Ana

Tbh, I am rather proud of these girls! I really like how cute D.Va turned out to be. I hope I did her in-game look justice! I'm happy with the details I manage to include for Ana too! It sure wasn't an easy feat to recreate Ana as an amigurumi doll since her in-game clothes are so complicated with so many details! But it was really fun and challenging to make them anyway~

One of the most special thing about this commission was that, I made their mini weapons~ It took quite some time considering how small it is. It was really hard to handle as well because of its size! I had paint and glue all over my hand when making these LOL.

Materials used for mini weapons: EVA foam of various thickness (2mm, 5mm, 10mm), metal wire, toothpick °◡°, hot glue, acrylic paint, and clear lacquer spray. 

Sorry there isn't a complete tutorial or visual guide for this.. I made them free hand and just cut as I went along. 

D.Va's gun. I forgot to take a picture of Ana's biotic rifle..

Please note that these mini weapons are not included when you purchase D.Va or Ana doll from me~ BUT. BUT. If you absolutely, desperately need it, you can still commission me to make it separately as a prop for the dolls you purchased from me! Downside is, I will charge separately, accordingly.. (personally wouldn't recommend it lel) Please understand that it is really too much work and so meticulous my eyes were literally like *_*

If you're interested to commission me for amigurumi dolls of your favourite characters, please PM The Craftsroom. Thank you~

Bat for Harley Quinn Cosplay

I had fun turning an ordinary baseball bat into Harley Quinn's bat, as seen in the Suicide Squad movie! I'll just go through the process quickly, and hopefully the picture serves well as a visual guide. It's a super simple prop to make IMO and you'll definitely enjoy it. I almost imagined myself as Harley scribbling my thoughts on my bat LOL.

I started with cleaning the bat to make sure there are not stains left from the stickers I peeled off (lol) of it, and removed the original bandage on the handle. Then I googled for reference images - find as many as you can showing the bat from various angles! 

I did a free-hand sketch of the 'GOOD NIGHT' letters and used it as a template for my bat. Not really sure where I kept that piece of scrap paper but if I find it and also find the time to make a digital copy of it, I'll share it here for free~ Then again, if you wanna be neat, you can choose to type out the words using a computer, have a printed out and just cut out the letters, leaving the center where you can use as a template to colour in on your bat.

Colour it in with red marker! Woohoo! Then outline it with black marker after.

Cursive wordings on the bat...

To be honest, I don't think there is any clear image/movie stills that shows what is really written on the bat that Margot Robbie holds. Most sources seem to point to the lyrics of 'I started a joke' by The Bee Gees, so I went with that. It's very suitable too! 

I wrote the lyrics of the song in cursive letters using a pencil on the bat, then went over it with black marker, and going over some of the words in red marker.

The other empty spaces of the bat, you can choose to fill it with suit symbols and Harley's quotes. For symbols, I see most sources have '◆' on them, arranged in fours. As for the quotes, you can use her quotes from either the movie or even better - the comic series!

The band at the bottom, before the handle...

Sketch the outline with a pencil first. I did it free-hand so there isn't any template that I can share. Start with the top and bottom lines so that you can gauge how wide you want the band to be. Then split the circumference into 4 parts and sketch the outline for the diamond shapes in each part. You can also just draw multiple jointed 'X' till you get 4 diamond shapes evenly distributed around the band. Then, draw a smaller diamond shape inside each big diamond.

I coloured the small diamonds with blue marker, left the space between the small and big diamond empty, and coloured the rest of the band with red marker. Finally, I used a black marker to outline the top and bottoms lines.

Cut out a long strip of white fabric and wrap it around the handle area of the bat! You can use brown/black acrylic paint to 'dirty' the fabric a little, to make it seem worn.

UPDATE**

A photo from Animangaki 2016 where I wore my Harley Quinn cosplay.

The bat looks pretty good, eh? :D

Photo by Skywing Photography