How To Make a Cosplay Outfit

What is Cosplay? According to Wikipedia.com, Cosplay is short for Costume Roleplay. This is where a group of people create or purchase costumes from the same anime, cartoon, video game, book, manga, or more, and act out short skits. Cosplay is common during science fiction, gaming, or fantasy conventions, or just for those who are very passionate about anime.  Steam Punk is a popular cosplay theme that does not necessarily draw from any individual anime or video game.

The first step in making a Cosplay Outfit is to choose an anime or video game for your group. Make sure that the costumes are unique enough that characters can be distinguished, and then go about finding your materials. Studying the costumes worn by the characters will involve looking through pictures, videos, and more to determine exactly what a specific costume looks like from multiple angles.

Finding fabric to match your character's outfit should not be difficult to find with the wide variety of materials and colors available from most fabric and fiber arts shops. Also, though you may need to use several different patterns from a number of different outfits, if your characters wear relatively normal clothes, or clothes that can be modified easily from a pattern.

You can find the materials for your Cosplay outfit at thrift stores, conventions, comic book shops, and more. Most often, costumes need to be sewn or crafted by hand, or modified from some existing clothing. Because finding patterns will be difficult or impossible to find, it is often necessary to create your own costumes. You can do this by altering existing patterns, or using clothing that fits you as a base for any additional clothing pieces that are needed.

The easiest way to create a Cosplay costume is to find something that does not involve much more than normal clothing. Finding individual props and makeup is usually much easier than crafting an entire suit of armor from scratch, so choosing an anime where most of the characters wear primarily normal or easily obtained costume pieces is a good idea to start with.

Armor can easily be done with anything from cardboard to craft foam cut with a hot knife. If the Cosplay you are doing involves maile, you can either make some yourself, or visit a local Renaissance fair and buy some. If it includes weapons, and many do, please do not carry around real or dangerous weapons.