Zer0 Cosplay: Costuming

So primarily what I'll be blogging about here will be my own little side projects, and the occasional project for school. My current work is in preparation for a cosplay at PAX East, which is a gaming convention that I've attended for two years now.

Last March, I cosplayed as Zer0 from Borderlands 2. This was probably my most complicated cosplay at the time; my two prior ones were the Engineer from Team Fortress 2, and Surge from X-Men, both of which relied mainly on sewing fabric and altering bought clothes, with some gauntlet making from molding materials or cardboard.

For the Zer0 cosplay, I found myself making two props: the sword and the helmet. In addition, the rest of the outfit required a more armored look, which I achieved via craft foam, sewn to the jacket under a layer of spray-painted lycra.

So in this costuming section, here's a pic dump of the process I went through to create the armored jacket and ...interesting pants that Zer0 wears.



This is a group shot of all the clothes I collected that I intended to make a part of the costume. The leggings on the far right are from H&M, bought a few years ago. The silk turtleneck, women's sport jacket, and black jeans were all bought at my local Goodwill, for a total of less than $20.

Here, I've marked out the area I planned to cut out of the jeans using a template piece of butcher paper so that both sides were even, to show the leggings underneath. If you look closely, this is how Zer0's pants are, and while I found them a bit odd, it certainly allowed a more comfortable convention experience.

A few shots of the jeans laid out straight. I ended up sewing the perimeter of the chalk line to the leggings; I'm pretty sure the video game just straight up ignores the way the crotch on pants work. Either that, or Zer0 has a adhedsive butt.

To figure out where I wanted to cut off the outer jacket, I modeled it to be slightly shorter than a cropped leather jacket that I had, since I wanted the armored jacket to cut off at the very bottom of my ribs, rather than underneath my ribs. Zer0 as a character is extremely slender and lankily proportioned, so it was little cheats to shorten my working area like this that allowed me to pack enough levels of detail into the abdomen.

Here's a shot of the jacket, once cut. I outlined the armor tracings using silver fabric paint, and I left the area around the zipper intact, since I would have to attach it to the abdominal shirt somehow. I decided against a possible double zipper system. As it turns out, I really don't like working with zippers, because cutting them short makes me really sad that I've just rendered several inches of zipper useless.

Here's a shot of the butcher paper template that I used to make the armor outlines on the back of the jacket. 

 And here's a shot of the back of the jacket laid out.

I knew I wanted to pad the jacket somehow, in order to both add to the realistic effect and also increase my perceived bulk and posture. I had a lot of lycra leftover from my Surge cosplay, which I spray painted with gray and white spray paints.

 I used the same template pieces from earlier to mark out how large the foam for each piece was going to be.

The lines were drawn in pencil, and were fairly faint, so I had to work fast to cut them out!

To get the right weathered look, I let the spray paint can sit for a while before spraying some gray over the white, causing it to spatter and give the white a dirtied look. I dusted the gray with shaken white spray paint, to make it less uniform without making it obvious that I was blending another color layer in.

Here are the foam inserts for the back armor laid out on the spray painted areas.

I used Super 77 adhesive to stick each foam piece to the reverse side of the Lycra before I started sewing around them.

To get the tension right, I actually sewed the foam twice: once to fold the fabric around the edges tight around the foam, and the second time to actually attach the pieces to the jacket.

In this closeup shot of the stitching, you can tell that the stitches are rather wide and uneven; I didn't trust a sewing machine to sew through a layer of foam, two layers of Lycra, and a jacket, at such an obscure number of angle changes, so I hand sewed all of the armor onto the jacket. For the abdomen, I don't have any pictures of the process since it was maybe a week before the convention and I was borrowing somebody's sewing machine in the wee hours...but I basically sewed the silk shirt to the inside of the jacket, cut open the front and sewed the zipper in, and then cut up some old jeans to create the three ribbed rows that line Zer0's abdomen, along with the two armored panels in front that I made in a similar fashion as above.

And as you might know, Zer0 only has 4 fingers. Theoretically, this does him no boons as a sword-wielding ninja type, since the pinkie finger is actually indispensable for maneuvering a katana, but nonetheless...

I found these gloves on reuse for free. The catch: They were both left hand gloves. I initially picked them up because I thought they'd be convenient to motorcycle in, my momentary elation causing me to miss the fact that they would only work if I decided to amputate my dominant hand. When I decided to remove a finger from each to turn them into gloves for Zer0, I cut the pinkie off of one, and the thumb off of another, and reattached the thumb to the opposite side of the latter glove, in order to have a right glove. I fit my thumb, first, and middle finger into the proper fingers in the glove, and jammed my fourth and pinkie finger into the last finger in the glove. This was only mildly uncomfortable, and I found that I had more issues with my helmet steaming up. But more on that later.

Looks pretty derpy, huh? Oh well, nobody could tell. 

Since a cell phone is pretty much required at PAX to keep track of line updates and event updates, I installed a messy capacitive sensing bypass: A sheet of aluminum foil, threaded under two slots cut in the fingertip of the glove, and folded back over the finger pad of the glove.

At the Gearbox panel I attended, the panelists actually talked about how they remembered giving Zer0 4 fingers to hint that he was alien, and one of them gave me props for actually making my cosplay have 4 fingers only :]

I'll post how the helmet and sword were made in the next update, along with the convention experience and the final costume set.