For Sakura-Con 2019 my new big cosplay will be Mystogan from Fairy Tail. This will be my cosplay contest costume and the first time doing a contest, so I will be going all out with this cosplay. It will involve doing wood work, 3D printing, molding, casting, leather, fabric, and metal work. And you bet I will be taking all you guys along for the ride showing you step by step what I am building.
To get started on this cosplay I have done a ton of research to get all the reference photos needed to build the costume. I have a massive folder of every useful photo I could find of Mystogan online. I also watched all the Fairy Tail episodes with him in it to get some more screen shot photos from within the anime with diffrent angles to cover all my bases. This is generally how I start out doing bigger cosplay projects so I have a solid base to launch off of.
As of today I have made a pattern for the first of his five staves:
To do this I used my protector and some pattern paper in my garage. First I marked how tall I was, where my hips, and shoulders were. Next I did the same thing but with a photo of Mystogan standing up just to make sure I could have everything to the same scale. This will come in handy when I go to pattern the costume as well as with making the other four staves. After that I took a reference photo of the stave I was trying to build a pattern of and set it to the right scale to my hight measurements and how tall I wanted the stave to be relative to my hight. Next I traced out the outline of the stave photo onto my pattern paper and made sure to be as accurate as possible. Finally I measured how wide the wood needs to be and how tall over all the stave will be. I am mainly worried about the top part of the stave right now and can easily adjust the over all hight at any point.
For this one I haven't fully decided if I am going to make it out of all wood and just finish it up really nice. Or if I am going to make a wood master then make a silicone mold and slush cast it out of resin. It would be easier to make it out of wood, but it would also be way heaver than a slush cast resin version. Guess we will just have to play it by ear and see how things go. I do know for the cosplay contest judges will be looking for use of diffrent materials and techniques throughout the costume/ props. So I might just end up doing this stave out of wood just for that aspect of things.
Tomorrow/ this week I will try and get the main top part of the stave built up. This one should be relatively easy. With just a few cuts then I will use metal pins and Titebond 3 wood glue to connect everything together strongly. After that I will take some wood putty to fill the spaces between the individual segments, sand that back, and depending on if I want to mold it or not I will finish it more or less.
Here is a photo of Mystogan with all of his staves:
Here is a projected photo of Mystogan to get the hight scale correct:
Here is my stave reference photo projected up to size:
Here is the finished pattern:
Hope you guys like this new project. Figured it would be fun to make a prop out of something that wasn't just printed. I also think I will either make the backwards 3 stave or the fan stave next. I will probably save the skull stave for last since it's the most complex and will involve CAD design, printing, molding, and casting. Also I'll do my best to do at least one update for this project a week but hopefully more.
I will also try to sprinkle in some other smaller random projects between posts about this larger project. In fact I should have a small mold/ cast project post up tomorrow! :D
Thank you for reading about everything I have been up to and I look forward to posting the next update soon!