Ravenna from The Huntsman: Winter's War
Inspiration
CAZ Art and Design. She was making Emily Blunt's silver Freya costume, so the opportunity to cosplay alongside such a talented lady was too good to pass up. Also THIS DRESS. I fell in love with it.
Production
Oh god. Every part of this was challenging, and required so many different techniques. From the top down:
Crown
It was made using a pepacura technique where I created a pattern for each crown spike and assembled them out of bristol board. They were then glued onto the band and the entire thing was covered in polyester resin (the stuff you use for fibreglass). The details were pressed out of Supersculpey. The entire thing was sanded, but not enough, and spraypainted gold.
Wig
Four combined french braids later... Some were dutch, some were waterfall, some were normal, some were braided with pieces of the other ones braided in. It took me like 4 tries or something.
Dress
Loosely based on a pattern, that was then highly adjusted to get the big dip in the front and the long train in the back. Uses 18 billion different materials including sequin rope, fabric yarn, gold fabric paint, pleather, sequin fabric, gold fabric puff paint, and tassels.
Cape
- 50 metres of black rooster feathers spray painted gold.
- A whole bunch more loose black rooster feathers painted gold
- A complicated collar wire frame to hold it in place.
- 4 metres of gold drapery fabric.
- Buckles.
Shoes
Regular crazy heels, spray painted black and gold.
Jewelry
The necklace was handmade using snaps. The earrings I purchased and painted.
Application
Oh god. Actually putting it all on is not that bad, many of my other costumes are worse. The makeup is relatively simple, because who would want to cover Charlize Theron's beautiful face!?!?! The cape means that this costume is not a con floor costume, but the act of putting it on is simple.
I wore this with CAZ to Ottawa ComicCon 2016 and we won an award in the Artisan division. This was the award that bumped me up to Master.
Photos by Open Shutter Photography
