MCM London Comic Con

I took the train down from Glasgow on Thursday afternoon and met Lisbeth at Waterloo. We took the train out to Roehampton University, my home for the weekend.

Friday dawned loud and early, in the form of a fire alarm. I was staying with Lisbeth at her room in Roehampton University, and in October the fire alarm had gone off at least 4 times, my sister said. This Friday it went of at 6:15 a.m. Not very funny.

Thus we didn’t get up as early as I had planned, but it was good to blame it on the fire alarm instead of my own laziness. The first stop for the day was the Moomin Shop in Covent Garden. I think it’s safe to say I spent a few pounds in there.

Then we hit a few more shops before taking the tube to London Excel and MCM London Comic Con! This was a lot bigger than Lisbeth and I are used to and we'd never been to the Excel before. But because there were so many people we just followed the crowd and got to where we was supposed to be, the get-your-wristband queue.

It was a long queue, but it moved fast. And suddenly we were in! It was huge and confusing and we had no idea where to go and what to do. Now this was a little bit before 2 pm, and suddenly everybody started queuing down the length of the ExCel. We tentatively got in line, no idea what we were queuing for. At 2 pm we found out. The doors into a massive hall opened and everybody streamed in. This was the dealers' stalls, stands upon stands of sexy things you could buy. It was heaven.

While walking around the stands for hours is cool, we had no idea what else was going on. Where was the program, where were things happening? After a bit of exploring I think I found all of the rooms. As for program I caught a sneak peak of episode 1 of the upcoming Tomorrow People. I haven’t seen the original series but this remake looked interesting and I will follow it for a while when it airs.

All in all this was a pleasant day. There were many people, but not many cosplays. Lisbeth and I figured perhaps the British folk had school or work and wouldn’t break out the big guns until the weekend.

Saturday.

We thought the Friday had many people. Well it was nothing compared to the Saturday. It was crawling with people!

I did find the information stand and thus the con book so I could find out what was going on. It wasn’t much of interest as I haven’t seen either Haven, Lost Girl, Under the Dome, Warehouse 13, Young Dracula or By Any Means, the shows headlining and holding panels during the weekend. And I had no relations to the voice actors invited from the video games I haven’t played and the animes I haven’t watched dubbed in English. The only guest I was really excited about meeting was Kai Owen, who plays Rhys Williams in Torchwood. He’s a really nice guy!

Lisbeth and I spent the first part of the day working our way through Comic Village, looking at the work of the skilled artists. I fell for this comic by Mimi, Fruit Machine, and bought three volumes. And I bought some really cool tea room prints from Audrey Molinatti.

With all the people, I knew it was going to be difficult finding fellow Norwegians. We were in luck though, and stumbled upon this beautiful Game of Thrones gang.

Batbunny Cosplay, Starbit Cosplay, Santatory

Starbit Cosplay

Batbunny Cosplay, Starbit Cosplay, Santatory and Aigue-Marine Cosplay

Aigue-Marine Cosplay as Daenerys, Martine as Cersei, Starbit Cosplay as Sansa, Santatory as Margaery and Batbunny Cosplay as Ygritte

I'm afraid I didn't really take many pictures of cosplayers during the weekend. I did get a few.

Willy Wonka

Snow White

Poison Ivy and Batman

And we tried to take a spinning picture of me, but it didn't work out that well.

At the end of the day it was time for Euro cosplay. There were 30 and something competitors and the competition lasted about 2 ½ hours. There were so many stunning costumes and good scene shows.

I don't quite agree with the judges' choice of winners, though. Number one went to the Netherlands, to the same person who won last year. She was cosplaying Edward Elric from Fullmetal Alchemist and even though her scene show was very good and entertaining and her costume was great, I thought the choice weird.

It just had me thinking what it takes to win a cosplay competition these days. I personally like the costume part better than the roleplay part. I looked at all the cosplayers with their big and elaborate armour, their massive and fantastic dresses and their amazing props and thought WOW! Edward Elric walks on stage and I thought, really? The skit was quite funny though.

I feel like some of the big and elaborate costumes you see belong to characters who doesn't necessary have a strong personality shining through, or maybe doesn't have many lines, or any at all, in the franchise they are from. Thus it becomes difficult making a good scene show, you are stuck with e.g. battle scenes or waving your props around on stage. And then you have already lost in cosPLAY competitions I feel.

Now the winner, Iloon, did have the best Edward Elric costume I have seen and there is a lot of really good craftsmanship in the costume that weren't that visible from a distance. What irks me most about her winning is that she also won last year. How is that even possible? Is the winner automatically qualified for next year? The winner should win an awesome prize, like a trip to Japan like NCC does or many-monies-worth of fabric or foam. And then a new person should have the chance to win next year.

Well, enough on my thoughts about this. I don't have any pictures since my crappy digital camera didn't like the lack of light in the theatre. Moving on to 

Sunday

I lay in bed sunday morning berating myself for not being able to get up, as usual. I finally got up 40 minutes after I was supposed to, and then my phone went and surprised me. It wanted me to confirm this new time it had detected, one hour back. Had I moved a time zone since going to bed? I finally understood I had completely forgot about turning the clock from summer time to standard time. I suddenly had an extra hour. We used it to get breakfast at Waterloo, how inventive of us.

We spent the morning going through the dealers' hall again. I always found something I hadn't seen before when I walked through. This time I found a Norwegian version of Lady and the Tramp and wondered how that ended up there.

 I also bought myself a Catbus plushie after considering getting one for ages. I am quite happy with it!

The only program of interest for us today was a UK Garrison panel, but unfortunately I thought it was at 2 pm when it was at 1 pm, so we missed it.

I did get some more pictures of cosplayers, though.

Mary Poppins!

221B Baker Street! Loved this one.

Cats

Don't know what this was supposed to be. I just took a picture to show you all how annoying it was. You don't bring this sort of costume to a crowded convention.

A giant rubik's cube

More Cats.

I also took a picture with the Tardis, Davros and K9

That was it for Comic Con. I went home, slept and awoke the next day to find there had apparently been a "storm" the night before. Thus getting from Roehampton University to Euston Station was made ten times more difficult by the trains being cancelled. Fortunately I had a lot of time and patience and made by way to the train station using a bus and some tube stops.

The train station was crazy. A lot of trains had been cancelled due to the storm. It wasn't windy at all in London at this point and wether it was because trees had fallen on the lines, there was windier where the train was going or if the British are just to cautious I will never know. 

When the platform to my train to Glasgow was announced everybody actually ran to the platform and were in a panic to get on the train. I had reserved a seat in couch B, but apparently that didn't mean I was secured a spot on the train. I was lucky to get on and ended up somewhere in coach D. I overheard a mother with to children who had reserved seat on the 8:30 am train, but that this train (at 1.30 pm, one train left for Glasgow per hour) was the first she had actually managed to get on. It was crazy I tell you, crazy.

But I got home in the end.

Weeping Angels Cosplay

Photographer: Aslak Sødal

My friend Karoline and I made Weeping Angel costumes from Doctor Who this spring. We were going to a convention in Larvik called Banzaicon, and their theme was Time Travelling Trouble. We wanted to to something from Doctor Who, and after googling Weeping Angel cosplays we decided to try for ourselves. Neither of us are very exprienced costume makers, and we didn't quite know where to get the materials we needed, but we did our best. We found some great tutorials that inspired us, and if it wasn't for them we wouldn't have a clue what to do. So a big thanks to Kilayi's Cosplay, Penwiper and Alex for ideas about the wings.

The first thing to do was get some reference pictures. We watched the episode "Blink" and took a lot of screenshots, like this:

The Dress

First we sewed an underdress. This was practically me lying on the fabric, drawing a rough outline of myself, cutting out the pieces and sewing them together. Karoline and me are built almost exactly alike, so what fitted me fitted her. The fabric is cotton fabric from Stoff og Stil

I sewed a zipper into the back of the underdress to make it easy to put on and off.

The Angels outer dress we made in to parts. First, the skirt.

 The width of the fabric we bought was about 140 cm, so we just lay down the fabric and cut it at about 3 meters length.

Then we sew a running seam along the length in order to gather the fabric at the waist and create the folds we wanted.

We sew the two widths of the skirt together, leaving some space at the waist to get it on and off. It is fastened with velcro.

For the bodice we used the same technique for the wrinkled part. This is also 3 meters in length.

For the top of the bodice I cut out a front and back piece like this:

I sewed them together at the shoulders and sewed the gathered fabric on right above the breasts. The bodices also have elastic bands sewed on at the bottom to keep them tight to the waist. At the bottom of the skirt there is a hola hoop (kid sized) to get the right shape. 

The dresses are now ready for painting, and we had to suit up.

We bought 3 liters of grey acrylic wall paint, the cheapest they had at Coop Obs Bygg. First we painted the skirts and bodices with this colour as a base, then we added darker and lighter colours later to accentuate the folds.

When finished the skirt and bodice was stiff and looked and felt like stone. Not that it was heavy, it just looked like... a statue, which is what we're aiming for, so we were happy.

The Wings

Here we looked a lot at the reference photos. This whole costume is made as judged by the eye, and the wings are no exception. First we made a pattern on brown paper.

We drew the feathers on the front on one piece and the feathers on the back on the other piece. We wanted to make the wings in foam, but we had no idea where to get it, so we ended up bying cheap yoga mats on ebay. We drew out all the individual pieces on the yoga mats, labeled them and cut them out. We had to make two sets of wings, that is four inividual wings, four backsides and four frontsides. So we cut out feathers for 8 sides.

The pieces for the backs.

The pieces for the fronts.

We ended up using tapestry glue to glue them all together. It was cheap, I had a lot of it lying around and it worked quite well.

Inside the wings there is a skeleton of chicken wire and some plastic tubes for the fitting. To get the shape we wanted the chicken wire is rounder at the top.

We didn't have enough foam to cover the large piece at the back, so we used some thicker, styrofoam-ish foam my dad had lying around. It's the purple thing in the picture below. To make it easier to glue the ends of the purple and green foam together I added some papier-mâché over the chicken wire.

Now they are ready for paint. I used the same gray acrylic wall paint base we used on the dresses, then added in darker streaks to indicate feathers. On the backs, the purple foam automatically became darker, but in the end that looked quite nice.

To fasten the wings to our backs we had a lot of help from my dad. I am forever grateful for that help. We needed a system that would allow us to easily take the wings on and of, since we needed to bring them on the plane from Trondheim to Larvik.

I will try to describe how the fastening mechanism work. There is a wooden board with padding attached to our backs with shoulder straps, over the underdress. There are also thick metal wire going down from the wooden board to support and align it down our backs. There are straps going from the metal wire and around our waist. I forgot to take a picture of it, so you'll have to do with this crude sketch:

The bodice was slipped on over this and the two metal rods protruded out through two slits in the bodice.

In the skeleton of the wings there were some plastic tubes, as I mentioned above. These were simply thread onto the metal rods.

To keep the wings in place we used two bent metal pieces that went from the inside of our wings onto the wooden board, like this:

On the inside:

My dad would have done this differently if we had more time. This is kind of a last second solution. We had to adjust them a bit during the convention because the metal pieces sometimes slipped into the wings but it all worked out fine in the end.

The Wigs
We started out braiding our hair and covering it with plastic foil.

Then we covered our heads in modroc (gipsbånd) and slipped it of when it had dried.

For the hairs we used silicone caulk (fugemasse) because it was really cheap at Obs Bygg. We used about one canister on each wig. In the end they turned out to be quite heavy, but not to heavy.

We painted them with the same gray paint as the dresses and wings, then added darker and lighter stripes. If I ever do something like this again I will paint the modroc before I add the hair, it was difficult to cover all the nooks and crannies in paint.

The Arms
We did not paint our arms but made gloves out of tights. We made the hands out of the feet by sewing fingers. It looks very nice when you turn the tights inside out and get the seam on the inside.

We cut out the crotch area so we could slip it over our heads. When painting them we used a mix of the acrylic paint and fabric paint so it wouldn't be to stiff and crack when we stretched the fabric. Ideally, the gloves should be painted and allowed to dry on the body, but since the convention was drawing close and Karoline had left me for Spain at this point I didn't have the time.

For the finishing touch on the gloves, wigs, dresses and wings we sprayed it with this granite spray we bought at Panduro.

It was very effective and we did not regret spending 199 NOK on it.

All the pieces ready I packed them into a suitcase, packed the wings and hola hoops in bubble wrap and brown paper to be sent as special luggage, and hopped on a plane. I stayed at my aunt and uncle's place not to far from the convention and a huge thanks goes to them for letting us stay and occupying their bathroom for as long as we did on saturday morning.

Getting the angels on turned out to take longer time than we thought.

We used grey snazaroo for the face and neck, along with some eyeshadow for the shadows on the face. We considered making masks but we didn't have the time and we thought it would be a drag to walk around in all day.

Photograph by Aslak Sødal.

In the (very little flattering) photo of me above you can se a close up of the make up. I like the way it turned out. You can also see the white mesh lenses we used. They made everything a white haze. We both are a bit near sighted and we couldn't find proper corrective white mesh lenses, so we didn't see all that much that day. Another detail you can see are the nails. We glued fake nails over the gloves and coloured them grey with nail polish. We didn't have the time to do it properly so mine fell of during the day, but it looked pretty cool when they were all on.

Photograph by Aslak Sødal. The Dalek is made by Hadley Cosplay.

Photograph and editing by Danarki. 

Photograph by Aslak Sødal.

Photograph by Starbit Cosplay. 10th Doctor by Captain Imaginary.

I lost a lot of sleep over this costume, but when we came to the convention it was totally worth it! Everybody (that know of Doctor Who) thought we were scary, and many came to talk and take pictures. We even got featured in some of the local newspapers, Østlandsposten and Vestfold Blad.

Any questions? Feel free to ask.