While I was dealing with the frustrations of thermoforming and trying to tint things, I was also working on the rest of the cosplay: the costume itself. I went on a consumerist mall safari to acquire a leather jacket. At first, I stopped by the Garment District, which is a consignment and thrift store in Cambridge that tends to have nice vintage retro things. But their leather jackets, while awesome and great quality, were running more than $50 on average, and I didn't want to spend so much on a jacket I'd end up modifying and sticking things on. So I headed to the mall, and ended up buying a men's pleather jacket from H&M.
Luckily, there's quite a precedent for making these hand-studded Daft Punk jackets, so I was able to find a template online for the pattern. I used an awl to poke a hole through all the points on the printed pattern.
Thus, I was able to tape the pattern onto the back of my jacket and use a lot of pressure with a silver paint sharpie to essentially "transfer" the points onto the jacket in a semi-permanent manner.
Turned out pretty clear; I touched up a few points, but for the most part, the dots came through.
And then I sat down at my desk job with my multitool, 300+ double pronged metal ball studs, and the entire second season of House of Cards. I was trying to avoid catching the jacket lining in the prongs of the studs, so I wasn't able to just poke them through and bend them down; I had to do some finagling with the needle nose pliers of my Sog multitool and wrangle them into place under the pleather layer only by feel.
After many many hours of House of Cards and many sore fingertips later, I had a kickass jacket with the Daft Punk logo studded on the back. This is much more my element, being a human Bedazzler.
Hella dope.
As for finishing up the electronics, I bought a sound-activated EL wire driver from Adafruit, and also purchased a visualizer from Amazon. Unfortnuately, this visualizer was meant to plug into the cigarette lighter port on a car, so a friend lent me an adapter, and I wired it up to an 8-AA battery pack (8*1.5V=12V, which is the car battery voltage. Amp hours...let's not talk about those). Here is the setup for the visualizer, all wired up.
I wanted to make my own visualizer, but this is just a volume based one that worked fine. Additionally, it was pretty cheap, and also was the color and shape that I wanted, so everything looked fine in the end. I didn't have to change batteries the entire time I wore it at PAX East, though I had to resolder one connection (it had come loose from its electrical tape and was zapping me in the side occasionally until I got home on Friday...good times) and replace the adapter box for the visualizer once; good thing I bought two! I originally planned on modifying the connector to take less battery power, which is why I purchased two for backup. And here's a video of it working.
I rigged all the batteries (including the 4 for the EL wire driver) onto a piece of elastic ribbon that I wore around my waist as a belt. The mic box for the visualizer was attached to the inside of my helmet so that the visualizer would pick up my speech and display it, and the mic from the EL wire was attached with velcro to the back of my jacket collar, a little discreet black box. The adapter and driver were put into the inner pocket in the jacket. I'm really glad that none of the security asked me to take my jacket off; no doubt the heightened fear since the Boston bombings would have made people freak out upon seeing the mess of wires and battery belt strapped to my body.
The pieces for the gloves were molded out of paperclay, based on a pattern I found online. I made sure to label all the segments so I could keep them straight. I also made sure to take into consideration the fact that paperclay shrinks as it dries, so I molded all the segments to my fingers and then pushed them open slightly.
Then, I covered the segments in Bondo spot putty and sanded them until they were smooth.
Alas! Paperclay absorbs spray paint! So the nice shiny chrome parts are where there was Bondo, and the dull parts are where it was sanded away. I should have sealed them before I started spraying. I used weld-bond to glue them to the backs of gloves. I've found that weld-bond works extremely well for the fabric-paperclay interface; I used the same technique for the gunslinger I made for my first cosplay (an Engineer from Team Fortress 2.)
A picture of me wearing the gloves. They fit (unsurprisingly). The segments have held up over pretty strenuous use, throughout the convention, as well as whenever I've worn the costume to parties and such afterwards.
And in the next (and final!) post, the final product and finished costume!
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