Conceptual Cosplay

*Note: This entry is aimed at people who have a basic knowledge of sewing skills. I’m not going to go over the details of how I actually sewed the cosplays I made so if you’d like more in depth instructions then just feel free to ask.

   There are plenty of times when you decide on a cosplay that the outfit is pretty straightforward and you have lots of reference images for the character you want to play. But there are other times when you don’t have as much to go on or you want to make a conceptual outfit for portraying an animal, inhuman character, or making a more realistic version of a character’s outfit. Many people like to cosplay as Pokemon and making an outfit that resembles a certain Pokemon is called know as making a gijinka. (Here is a Deviant Art Group all about gijinkas http://pokedex.deviantart.com/) Pokemon gijinka are usually very popular at anime conventions and thus the specific topic that I’m going to discuss today.

   Some gijinka outfits are created to make a person look as much like the Pokemon as possible while other outfits are made to look like more realistic versions of how that Pokemon would look as a person.  If your creating a gijinka cosplay then you can lean towards one side of that spectrum or find a place anywhere in the middle that you like. That’s one of my favorite parts about Pokemon cosplay, you can pretty much do whatever you want with it. I have two different (though similar in concept) gijinka cosplays of the same Pokemon, my favorite Pokemon Drifloon!

   So after you pick the Pokemon that you’d like to be you have to decide what kind of outfit you want to create. You can look online for ideas or simply wing it and be as creative as you want to be. The first Pokemon item I made was a Drifloon hoodie.  I wanted to make a hoodie because I could wear it to a con as a cosplay but also wear it around at home like a normal hoodie. So I sketched out a basic idea of how the hoodie should look then cleaned it up in photoshop to get a better picture of how I wanted it to look. But you don’t need any fancy programs to take the extra steps like I did, I suggest just drawing up a picture of what you want and then adding details once you get the basic idea set in stone. So here’s how my sketch turned out:

   The next step was figuring out how much of each fabric and what type of fabric I would use. I picked fleece because its soft, stretchy, and warm. I also decided to use fabric glue to place the eyes and x-mouth onto the hoodie because I din't want any stitching to show around the edges of those details. Then I just had to hope that I could find material that was close enough to the right colors. After several hours of measuring, cutting, and sewing I was done:

   So you can see how my idea transitioned into a real life hoodie. It turned out a tiny bit small (the store I got the fabric from was a little short on the amount of purple fabric I needed but it was the best purple fleece I could find) but it still fits all right. Since this blog is getting a little long I’m going to leave off here and next time I’ll cover my other Drifloon cosplay and why I feel like it’s a better outfit for a Pokemon gijinka.