Beastly undertaking

[borogove13]

 Working on a far too complex costume for Dragon*Con.  What else is new?

This year it's Disney's Beast.  I'm going to check-list some things here so I know what I need to do, what I've done, and how my progress is coming.  The con is 76 days away, so I've got 11 weekends to make this happen starting....now!

Head

• Facial prosthetic: been working on this with for a while with some custom prosthetic makers out of Canada since the beginning of the year.  The sculpt looks good and they should be running off the appliances this week.   It builds up the brow and nose ridge to match Beast, and has the somewhat triangular nose-tip of the beast.  This should give me the right shapes and look great made-up.
  
• Ear prosthetics: I bought a pair of faun ears from Michael at Aradani.  These should work great, and match the shape of Beast's ears from the movie very closely. 

• Teeth (tusks): I had tried finding a good pair of tusk dental appliances pre-made, but had no luck.  One set I did find just doesn't feel or look right, so I ended up getting a dental appliance kit from MonsterMakers so I can cast from my own teeth and sculpt my own beast tusks and teeth that truly fit to my teeth and the look I want.  I've laid things out to do the molding and casting of my own teeth and hope to at least have the stone cast done tomorrow and the lower tusks and teeth and upper fangs and teeth done before next weekend.  I have good instructions and feel good about the process, so this should come together well, I hope.
• Horns: Plan is to build them into the base of a kind of base hood that the mane will form off of.  Not sure what material yet, though.  Will get to that later.
• Mane: found a great faux-fur fabric that I'm planning to use for most of the coverings.  What I hope to do is build a kind of tight-fitting, possibly elasticized, hood to sit behind my jaw/beard and at the top of my forehead that I can build back from to form the lower mane and the upper hair leading back to the hunchback

Body:

• Back and Shoulders: Right now I'm thinking about using a set of football pads as a base, and then building out support chambers with Sintra and foam.  I'm hoping to keep that fairly light and open so I can stick some small, portable fans in there.  Faux fur goes over the top once formed.

Arms:

• Hands and Arms: I'm planning on doing a new take on the puppeting hand extensions I did for the Scarecrow and Tin Man last year.  I think I have some new ideas for ways to lighten them up and improve them all around.  One of my favorite new takes is replacing the rubber bands with a series of extension springs.  I've got some great springs to work with, so fingers crossed.   Luckily, Beast doesn't have the normal 3 joints at his fingers that people do, he only has two.  I caught that in the animation as I was watching.  He does have five fingers though, so no shortcuts there.  The hope is to make a wide shell fore-arm out of Sintra supports to bulk the fore-arms and give my fingers room to puppet.  That will then be furred with the faux fur.  Hoping to start on these this week and have the mechanism cut and put together by the end of the week.

Legs:

• Beastly legs: I bought and downloaded a very thorough set of plans for digitigrade stilts online.  The design is very sturdy, just a bit complex, so they'll take time to build, but should be worth it.  These will give me the dog-leg look that Beast's legs have.  I'll also be making a hinged toe-pad with foam latex toes like Beast's before finally making the fur "pants" that complete the legs.  The hope is to have a permanent connection of fabric from my toes down to the stilt's toes that then pulls up or possibly velcro's on over the leg from there up to allow for propper fastening of the stilts.  Might incorporate suspenders into the "pants"
• Tail: Simple shape made from the faux-fur.  Don't know if I'll wire it yet.

Ballroom Costume:

• Lindsay said she'll work on that, so as soon as I have the chest and hunch back put together and maybe the fore-arms, we'll get measurements for the coat and vest.  I figure we'll likely do the vest, shirt and jabot as a kind of false-front dickie that's adjustable from the back
• Pants: I'll probably just hit up Casual Male XL after taking my measurements with the suit on and then adjust them afterwards as necessary.
• Bow and pony-tail.  Plan here is to sew a simple shape from the faux fur, like a small version of the tail, and then sew it to a blue bow and attach a hair clip so it's a clip-on.

Basic cloak:

• No real plans yet.  Probably just get a bunch of maroon fabric and just do my best.  Clasp might be from a gold-painted and clean-finished wooden base from Michaels.  I mess with this once Ballroom Costume and everything else are squared away.