Wig Styling Head

 Whoop~ Not even certain if there is a reason to keep this blog up or not, since I don't really have sketches for absolutely everything.... -.- and looking from the dates, my updating is.... like it is.
....well....
An update~ <3

Since I desperately need a mannequin head now, where I could style wigs , then made
one myself. As a base used a years old papier mache head of myself, some failed makroflex horns and a leftover piece of a heavy pressed paper roll.

 Ripped off the experimental paper mask, cut the makroflex into lil' pieces and glued it all together, filled some empty spaces with newspapers.

 Taped the head on the paper roll and papier mache'd most of the thing over several times. Then made a new plaster face of myself, hotglued it on the old base, endlessly covered with latex and sanded, white spray primer, latex, more sanding, dosen more spray primer and varnish layers... Yeah, latex, it's something that looks like gesso, but it was much better to sand it down. All the different white materials and paints actually looked different..... so also added a white acrylic layer, but that made everything worse.... after that the spray primer and varnish combo started cracking off, so its all quite a mix there...

Glued some porolon layers all over the rest of the head, so there would be something to stick the needles in, hotglued a lycra layer on top The back of the head is a bit bigger than my own, but figured that would be exactly the space for hair under the wig anyway. It's not perfectly shaped, but still good enough. ....aaand added fake lashes.... Because.... why not. c:

Nothing super fancy, but got to style a first wig on this thing and it worked out perfectly~

...doesn't it look just like me? Haha~ 

The Thing

 Yes. A thing. A creepy little thing.
A thing that was part of my college composition installation.
One of the tasks was to make a cube and and put a ball inside it, up to you how you "decorate" it, this is what I did with mine. :)
 Something small and simple.

 The base was ~10cm ⌀ penoplast ball...

...And I couldn't really think of anything else than turning this thing into a critter...

 ...So I made it a lovely smiley face. :D

Poked it full of of copper wire...

 ...so the lil' balls of clay would actually stay on. After it was dry, also covered it with 2 layers of white glue.

 ....aaand some acrylic paints, varnish and ITs done.

The whole composition thing consisted of 3 task- a cube that has a ball in it, 3 figures and something made out of at least 3 paper sheets (which measurments I can't remember), all of it displayed decently +lightning. Spent forever on solberthing together the LEDs and the whole morning on covering the big windows on left...

And also a better view of my 3 paper figures-

Haven Trooper MGS4

 Hey, hey, hey~ I've been... Busy... But hey, look, an update!
I made a cosplay of Haven Trooper or aka a FROG,  regular female soldiers in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots.

 Getting the reference material was quite fun, because... Heh, there was a time when MGO was still active... So, for the sake of perfect cosplay refs, tried my best to get enough points over there to buy a Haven Trooper skin- it could be zoomed in, rotated 360°, every possible angle was there. (haha, it took two months. :DD) And oh, how I love the photo taking option in MGS4~ Got to knock out and paparatzzi some Troopahs~ c:
For the little barcodes and texts reference the best (and most readable) character was Vamp... He has exactly the same pants/bottom pice as these troopers and sharper textures in the game. x)

If anyone is interested, here's my reference material of the MGO version- https://www.facebook.com/silvia.sillaots/media_set?set=a.330804660367434.75822.100003137086929&type=3

 Well then~ I did start with sketches, but quite a lot of time has passed now, and... I can't find 'em. Hah. But started with the body part as usually- covered the mannequin with newspapers, drew on the patterns and cut them open. The body part here is my second try becuase... Strechy lycra and slippery vinyl doesn't really match. :D
Had to throughly hand stitch the two different material pices together before sewing with the machine. Also, on the back the middle shape is stuffed. All the holsters and little magazine/grenade bags, pouches were made the same way- first of newspapers, and eyeballed, compared the sizes to the pices I've already made.

 

 The most important part of this cosplay is obviously the helmet. Since I didn't have enough patience to mess around with pepekura and wanted to start making something right away, then... Yeah, eyeballed, compared with references and started bulding the helmet pice by pice.  

Made of cardboard, newspapers, a bit of camping mat, PVA and hot glue.

For the base used a hollow plaster head I've made of myself. The top of the helmet would have been better to make out of a big round plastic bowl... But I didn't have one big enough, so used a balloon, more newpapers and white glue.

  

Covering everything up with more newspaper and PVA/white glue layers. At first I only made half of the mask, because I wanted to make the front and back part detachable, but... I couldn't figure out how to connect them, so built the back of the helment onto the front part.

 

-How it looked from the inside. I made the headphone-ish things, the front space between the eyes and the area near the jaw line too short,  so, cut those part apart, hotglued/taped some more cardboard between and fixed it again. Constantly sanded, added thin layers of filler and finally covered with gesso.

 

My very first simple LED connecting... :D Solberting the pices together. It's... Actually so easy, but it took quite a while to figure out how not to burn another line of LEDs for nothing. -.-

 

The finished base of the helmet.

 Haha~ Figuring out how to mix such an odd beige colour took it's time, but quite happy with the result. Some asymmetries here and there, but hey, that's what cha get for eyeballing.

 Paintd with acrylics and added glossy varnish. Fot the texts I... Printed out all the texts and then letter by letter measured the hight, width, marked with little white gel pen dots and then painted them on with a small brush and white acrylic.

 

The armor~ Everything made of foam camping/joga mats, hotglued together. Again... Sine I had no idea of heat guns, then taped a lot of copper wires behind the foam to give it a shape. Latered glued on a brown fake leather/vinyl layer and inside covered with PVA. 

Welp, now I can say, DONT EVER DO THAT. Seriously! Idk, what was I even thinking... Since most of the body is tightly covered with foam armor, the skin can't breather and all the pices I had covered with white glue... The glue started melting with body heat and now ruined the bodysuit compleatly... ;^;

 

-How the round elbow and knee joints were made.

 Cut out an oval foam shape, snipped a lot of little triangle shaped cut in on the edges and taped it all together, so now the foam hold in a round shape, also covered these with stockings, ~4layers of white glue, coloured with acylics+ final finishing varnish layer. At least this way, with the stocking layer, I could sew these parts on the bodysuit. 

 

  

 For the little round rivets she has EVERYWHERE, used some washers. At first I thought they were bronze, but after playing MGS4 again and looking more closely at these things.. They seemed more golden, so~ recolour all 'dem little things.

 

Sew the washers on and coloured the threads golden... Yeah, sewed them on, because with hot glue they dropped off after a while.

 The shoes~ These were funky lil' bastards to walk in. The nails shouldn't be too long, since they *will* get on the way when you walk or just break off and... As you can see that one nail  on the newspaper on the top pic, yeah... I had a carboard strip between my every toe. :|

 

The holsters~ The so called 'grenades' and P90 'magazines'  were there only to make it seem like there was something inside the bags/pouches. The "grenade" shells were made of waterballoons+ papier mache, and for the magazines- only a pice of porolon, top part coloured black.

 Machete, machete, macheeetee~ I loved making this pice~ Made it of plywood, the holster is of foam covered with vinyl and iron on studs. The smaller blades were later remade of plywood too, since these carboard versions... just got lost on the first con day. :D

And that's it~ 

Competed with this cosplay at EuroCosplay2012 in London and also, there was the 25th anniversary MGS cosplay contest on the same day when I was there, so... Took part and got the first place there... :D 

Met a lot of awesome people, fellow fans, cosplayers and this was definetly one of the most eventful days of my life, I'll never forget~ <3

Me, Myself and I

Hehumm... Hello? Anyone there? :D

 Do I get the "most irregular updater" title now?  :D

Well yeah, I've got a dosen things to do all the time and just.... Forget about this blog. ._.

But hey, look! An update! c:

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"Me, Myself and I"- one hell of an headline, huh? Haha, well, once ya see the thing, you'll get what I mean. It's an installation project made for my art college course "Spatial Perception".

This was finished 17.March 2013. 

So~ Had this idea that I'd like to use some kind of masks and hands. 

Ended up making two plaster faces of myself- one of the cut in two+ hands. Here I tried to smoothen out the surfaces by mixing n' adding more plaster layers.

 

And.... Fingers need nails too, yes? :3

Bought the cheapest nails possible and cut/filed them shorter.

 

Gathered all the materials toghether annnnnddddd~ Time to glue all this stuff together~

Materials: cardboard, plaster, plastic conduit, paper table covers, copper wire, gesso, acrylics, hot glue.

 

The main part. c:

The very first idea was to make a watercolour painting on a circular paper, but soon realised, that it would be a lot more interesting, if some of the parts were reaching out of the surface, if the faces would be 3D and if the hands would be "coming out" of the frame. Just stumbled on H.R.Gigers work too, so guess the sort of ornamental hose thing came from there. ;)

 Here you can see where and what I started gluing. The first thing was ofcourse cutting out the cirlce from a large carboard pice, next making holes on the edges more or less with equal distances and half gluing/half binding the plastic conduit all around the edges with copper wire. After that it was all hot glue, finally painted over with gesso (because it stayed on plastic better than plain white acrylic :s), black acrylic details and a "final touch" with fake eyelashes.

 

 Added some of my composition course black cardboard shapes around the final thing, so it wouldnt look too pale against the large white wall. :)

 

 

 

Recycled Graduation Dress

How long has it been from my last post? Well, long. Too long.

About six months perhaps? c:

It seems practical college and another tosen personal hobbies take all the energy and motivation completely away to post stuff online. Or... Ofcourse, I have taken pictures of many different artsy creations, but for some I don't really have the sketch or maybe proper pictures of the outcome... And for some awkward reason this damn blog likes to crash and delete my post when I'm almost finished. >:I

But without further ado or more silly excuses, here is one of my latest projects.

A recycled graduation dress. :)

Me and my dearest fellow course mate Tauri got a request to both choose some used clothings from A&D boutique, redesign them into graduations dresses, give a lil' interview, share our thoughts about graduation fashion and all of it was published as an article in Tartu Postimees 30.May, virtually published 2.June.

Definitely check out Tauri's glamour'licous blog of his designs, creations and other fashion related posts at:

I'm so glam i sweat glitters ♥

You can read the article here~  Estonian only tho.^^;
  (and oh wow... I have never ever, ever received so many negative comments before. I mean seriously. What happened... :s) 
(Okay, I get it, the pink dress was more or less okay as it was before. I was pretty surprised too that I could cut it up, but it should be obvious that these aren't meant as real graduation dresses. Hahaha~ Oh please. xD But I'm not sorry. I enjoyed the process and like the outcome. The model was super sweet and photoshoot even better than what I imagined.)

Onto my sweet pink dress~ First, here are the two dresses I got to use.

  After staring at the two, here is what I came up with.

Ripped them apart- cut the pink dress in half, ripped up the ruffles, decorations; from the black dress cut the white laced part and pretty much shredded the black skirt part.

Started with the skirt. Since the material is pleated, tried to more or less equally pin it down on the mannequin...

...and stitched it together by hand. I wanted to use the second half of the skirt as sleeves, so had to stitch them in place too.

Over-locked the edged. Yup, with black thread. :D

The pieces will be connected with the black-white laced waist anyway, so didn't bother with the thread.

Stitched the black waist together with he skirt and over-locked them together.

Continued with the upper part. Tried to match the sleeves with the bust, stitched and over-locked together from the inside. Also, since this pleated fabric was quite impossible for me to handle... See those black over-lock seams at the edged of the sleeves? I folded them twice and carefully hand stitched them from the inside. No visible seams from the outside and~ The edge holds puffier~ c:

When the body part was done, sewed a couple of black straps from the black skirt, put them in place on the mannequin and connected them on the body.

How could I call a pink dress sweet n' cute without flowers or ruffles? :D

Curled up some ripped up ruffles as roses, stitched them together and sew on the dress.
Couldn't resist adding some white beads. ;) (even tho it's not visible on the photos...)

And here is the result~

(Shot in a proper photo studio n' all :o)

Photographer: Patrik Tamm

 Model: Liisi Laaniste