Jigglypuff: Foam Animal Ear Tutorial

I will admit it: I am a huge pokemon lover.  When pokemon go came out, I was running around Nashville trying to catch em' all, and I even re-watched Indigo League (well, the portion that's on Netflix) so I could have a constant poke-fix.  Re-watching Indigo league reminded me of how much I love Jigglypuff, that sassy little pink blob with his marker of doom. 

I also really love Clefairy, because it is adorable, and for awhile I was thinking it would be really fun to get some moon shoes and bounce around as Clefairy.  So I went on Amazon and looked at moon shoes.  And while I was looking, I found these:

At that moment, I scrapped the Clefairy idea and decided to make Jigglypuff into a reality.

To begin, I decided to make Jiggly's ears.  It was incredibly simple, and all you need is a 2 1/2" thick piece of upholstery foam (approximately 1 1/2' x 2' - it just needs to be big enough to cut 2 10" equilateral triangles.); good scissors; a knife to cut through the foam; black fabric; pink fabric; and hot glue.

Step 1:

Trace two equilateral triangles onto the foam, making each side 10" (you could maybe go down to 9 if you want), and cut out the triangles using your knife.  You should get a piece that looks like this (although I'd already started carving this one):

Step 2:

Carve your triangle into an ear shape!  As you can see above, the outside of the ear should be slightly curved.  You will then want to hollow out the inner ear a bit, like so:

Make sure to leave a lip around the edge of the inside of the ear, as shown above.

Step 3:

Once you have the ear carved the way you want, fire up your glue gun and cut out your black fabric, which will be going on the inside of the ear.  I made sure to cut it slightly bigger than needed, just in case I messed up.  Once you have it cut, glue it down.  Super simple. 

Step 4:

The next step is to glue your pink fabric on.  This is ever so slightly more difficult, as you will have to make a small dart at the tip of the ear to keep the fabric from wrinkling.  You can see how it works here:

The end result?  Some fun Jigglypuff ears that will fit on a huge plastic Jigglypuff body!

 

Lion King Hyenas: Completed Costumes

Banzai: "Hey did we order this dinner to go?”

Shenzi: “No, why?”

Banzai: “'Cause there is goes!"  

The Lion King

We did it!  We finally completed the hyenas, and with plenty of time to spare before DragonCon!  The costumes ended up being a hit, and we somehow managed to win Best in Show in the Hallway Costume Contest out of over 300 entries.  We were thrilled!  I honesty figured we'd have no chance when we saw the number of wonderful entries, so we were floored when they announced the results at the Masquerade!

Walking in the Parade... It was miserable... .9 miles of hell.
But all of the kids yelling "Mufasa!" and the general great
reception made it 100% worth it.

Here are links to all of the tutorials we made during the construction.

1. Hind Feet
2. Masks
3. Ears
4. Front Legs
5. Neck and mounting the head

There was no tutorial for the body since we just got gray onesies, painted them, and added a tail.

It's been quite a process, but we met a lot of wonderful people at DragonCon who gave us great advice for future projects, and we are chomping at the bit for the Smooth-On projects to arrive in the mail so we can start next year's project...

If you want to stay up-to date on next years project follow us on facebook at Phenix Cosplay,

Just a hint, but the costumes next year will have to do with Fallout.

Head and Neck Mounting Tutorial: Lion King Hyenas

When the world turns its back on you, you turn your back on the world. 

 Timon, The Lion King

This was by-far the part of the costume I was most worried about.  I had quite a few amorphous ideas about how the head would be mounted and the neck would be formed, but for quite awhile, I had no real idea of how any of it would come together.  Luckily, it did come together, and it ended up looking pretty darn cool!  We sacrificed quite a bit of visibility doing it the way we did, but we ultimately decided that we wanted to fabric all the way down to the mask from our heads.  The original Broadway costume was totally open from the head to the mask, like so:

It looks awesome, and I am pretty sure it was done that way to allow the actors to really be able to see where they were going on stage, but the way we figured, we didn't need our visibility to be quite as good, and if we were in a situation that required full range of vision, we could just un-velcro the fabric and let it hang down.  The fabric we used is surprisingly see-though, and the color ended up being pretty close to what we had done the masks and body-suits in.   We did end up cutting small eye-slits into the fabric, but I don't think they were too noticeable.

To wearable parts of our head mounts were a GoPro chest harness and a GoPro head strap.  We then took the leftover crutch bars (the tops, which were cut off to make the hand stilts) and used Thermo-Loc (an extremely hard thermal plastic that comes in little sticks, just microwave on a silicone sheet for a few seconds and its malleable.  Available at http://www.thermo-loc.com/), just to attach the crutch to the clip that goes into the chest mount.  To really make sure the crutch was secured, we wrapped the crutch in duct tape.  Before you lock the crutch bar onto the clip, though, you will want to go ahead and drill a hole on the other end.  This hole will let you attach the bar to the head eventually.

Make sure the bar is attached at an angle so that
the head is positioned properly when bent over

On the base of the masks we used the sticks of thermo-loc to make a little loop that stuck out from the bottom of the mask like so:

We added hot glue to secure
then tape over everything, just to to be safe

This hole and the hole in drilled in the aforementioned metal bar are used to attach the head to the chest mount in a way that allows it to move (with the added benefit of making it easier to put on since the head is removable).  This was accomplished with a cheap trip to the hardware store.  Using a hitch style cotter pin, a clevis pin, and a washer.

How the cotter pin, clevis pin and washer look
when put threw the mounting bar

Now that the heads are mounted on a movable platform it was necessary to get them to move in sync with our heads.  That was actually way easier then it sounds.  We took the Go Pro head mounts that came free with the chest mounts we bought and tied a piece of twine to each side of the mount.  Then glued the other end of the twine to both sides of the top of the heads.

Takes some experimentation to get the
length of twine right.

At this point the heads are wearable.

As soon as we got the heads mounted like this we realized the chest mounts for the go pro where never meant for that kind of weight and are not comfortable so we ended up adding some foam padding we had left over from the feet to the underside of the chest mounts.

The next goal was to attach the necks to cover up our faces.  We did this by using a near see-through women's blouse, with everything above the lowest point of the sleeves cut off.  We hot glued the edge of the shirt to the back edge of the heads and used velcro patches to attach to the body suit.  Don't forget to cut eye holes.  Once we had the top of the blouse attached at the top we put it on and pinned up the bottom so that we could cut off and sew up the excess to make the necks flat.

pinned up bottom before it was cut off.
Pay attention to the exposed bar and mount.
We left this open intentionally so we could see
where we where walking.  since we where low to the ground
others could not see this opening

Don't forget to add hair onto the top of the neck.

FIN!

Animal Leg Stilt Tutorial

Look at you guys! No wonder we're dangling at the bottom of the food chain! 

Shenzi, The Lion King

The front legs ended up being far easier than Stoney and I had anticipated.  To make one set of legs, all it required was a set of aluminum crutches, an angle grinder (to cut the crutches), two 4" PVC couplings, a wire clothes hanger, foam (the same foam used for the hind feet), black fabric, duct tape, a drill, and 4 pennies.

Freshly cut crutches

Penny over the cut edge for safety

Fully duct-taped crutch ends

The arm cuff, secured by duct tape

Top view of the taped-in cuff

They work!

For the next step, we cut out the paws out of foam (same as with the back feet, but we didn't have to worry about gluing the foam onto shoes), and carved them to look more like paws and less like big blocks of foam.  Because the paws will be going onto crutches, you also have to cut a hole in them, which will allow the crutch pole to go through.  We carved the hole wider on the bottom to allow the foam foot to move with the crutch as we walked.  We also spray-painted the bottoms black just so they would blend in if we started waving our paws around.

At this point, you will need to get out the power tools.  To attach the paws, we drilled a hole towards the bottom of each crutch (the foot of the crutch pulls all the way out, and that is the pole you drill into).

The goal was to get the paw to sit around the foot of the crutch without spinning around and getting out of place.  This is where the hole comes into play.  You drill straight through the side of the pole, and then, using a thin metal rod (we used a cut up coat hanger, since we had already used part of it for the ears), you push the metal through one side of the foam foot, through the hole in the crutch, and then out the other side of the foot.  Like so:

Coat hanger poking through to other side of foot

The end result: foot held onto crutch

Once the metal has gone through, use hot glue on both ends to create a cap, which will prevent the metal from piercing the fabric and/or coming loose entirely.

When furring the feet, we did all of the toes first, then put the foot on the pole, and then finished furring.

The final step to creating your front legs is furring the rest of the crutch.  To do this, we essentially just created a fur sleeve, and then glued the fabric at the top and bottom to stabilize it.  Cut out a piece of fabric that can wrap around the length of the crutch (give yourself about an inch of extra fabric on the sides, and some extra on the top).  Sew down the length of the fabric to create your sleeve (we did the stitching on the inside to hide the stitches, but at this point you can do whatever you are comfortable with).  Before putting the fabric onto the crutch, you are going to want to make a cap for the metal screw that keeps the crutch's hand grip in place.  We just used a piece of foam that we cut a slit into and glued down:

Now just slide the sleeve up from the bottom to the cuff, and use hot glue to paste the fabric onto the inside of the arm cuff.  This acts as padding for the cuff while also keeping the fabric in place.

Slip the foot of the crutch, which now has the furred foot attached, back onto the crutch.  Use hot glue to attach the bottom of the fur sleeve to the foot.  At this point, you have a fully finished front leg!

Animal Ear Tutorial

Oh yes, the past can hurt.  But the way I see it, you can either run from it, or learn from it.

Rafiki, The Lion King

As much as I love our hyena masks, I have been itching to see them with the ears done, because I figured that would really solidify the hyena look.  I am very happy with the end-product, and they were pretty simple, both in design and execution. 

The basic outlines are made from wire coat hangers, which we untwisted and cut into shape.  Each ear has two parts: the main ear shape, and then a single wire running down the back of the ear, to give it depth.  The two pieces are held together with thermoplastic. 

The whole ear frame

The joint for the ears, to allow them to be three-dimensional.
This angle really lets you see what I mean when
I talk about using two pieces of wire to create the shape.

Once all four ears had been assembled, it was time to cover them in fabric.

We decided to do the ears with black fur on the outside and brown fabric on the inside, since that is pretty close to the cartoon:

Not Quite brown but close enough

 We started by laying the outer edge of the ear down on the black fabric and hot gluing a few spots down the length of the wire, and then continued to do the spot-glue method as we pulled the fabric around the wire frame, leaving an unglued lip around the entire edge:

Once the black fabric was secure, we placed the brown fabric by spot-gluing it onto the black fabric.  The final step was to take the unglued black fabric, fold it over the wire and glue it down to create a black edge on the ears.

Finished ear from behind

Finished ear from the front

The next step was attaching the ears to the heads.  We bent the wire so that it wrapped around the back of the masks, and then hot glued each wire in place.

Like so

Once all of the wires were glued, we then reinforced everything with a bunch of duct tape. (Super sophisticated, I know).

And voila!  We finally have ears on our masks!  

Banzai

Shenzi