Accidental geek cred, and costume rambling
I don't know how I do it, but somehow I manage to pick up accidental geek cred. I saw Harry Potter at a midnight opening show, I even got there "early", and I didn't even intend to see it in the first place!
My mom and I went to a 10 o'clock showing of Ratatouille on Tuesday, and as the credits rolled, people started coming in. We were like "Eh? Aren't they a little late?" and it dawned on us, hey, it's the Harry Potter crowd, in for the midnight showing. "Want to stay?" my Mom says, and although I was a little unsure about sitting for another three hours after a two hour movie, I couldn't resist the chance for a free movie. So, we just leaned back, kept a low profile, no one made a fuss, and got to see Harry Potter at midnight for free. Twofer night!
I've snuck into a second movie before, but it involved sneaking past the snack counter to the other side of the building. It involved MOVING. This was the laziest way to sneak into a movie ever. Just sitting there.
Ratatouille might be Pixar's best movie yet, but it's a different kind of movie from The Incredibles, so it's hard to tell. As for Harry Potter, I was a little apprehensive about seeing it, partially because I haven't seen the fourth movie yet, but also because the book is somewhat... torturous. Literally and figuratively! But the movie streamlines out some of the more annoying bits, so it was a more thoroughly enjoyable story. Oh, and Dolores Umbridge is still scarier than Voldemort can ever hope to be.
Also on Tuesday, I finally bought the fabric for the Final Fantasy Tactics Chemist costume that I'm making for Otakon, so now I'm totally committed! Talk about last minute, but if I just knuckle down over the next couple of days, I can do it. I'm still kind of agonizing over color choices a bit, but since I've already bought the fabric (and decent fabric stores are an hour away), it doesn't really matter anymore. I probably shouldn't even mention it (will that stop me? No.).
For the most part I'm modeling the costume on the official art that's been floating around for years. The sepia tone messes up the colors a bit, but I felt like I had a pretty good idea of what they were.
Of course, while the blue in the art looks nice, everyone associates chemists with the blue in the sprite. It's iconic! Although in the art, the blue doesn't cover as much -- it's just the hat and bolero, but it's still important, I'd say.
There were a lot of color options at Hancock Fabrics in the fabric I chose (they didn't really have any linen, and I'd die wearing felt in Baltimore despite the nice 'plush' look, so I went for %100 cotton), although perhaps not quite the hues I was looking for... although I did find one that looked a lot like the blue in the sprite, but I'm not sure if it was the touch of green in it or what, but it just didn't seem natural when you see it in real life, or it just didn't mesh well with the other colors I picked out. The in-game character portrait has a darker shade of blue, but I felt that wasn't right for the overall look (although the woman who did this female chemist costume chose a somewhat darker shade.), so what I ended up with is somewhere in the middle of it all, I guess. (it might look a bit brighter in the picture here)
They certainly didn't have anything like the salmon/coral color in the middle colored stripe, so I picked out an orange as a substitute, and the stripe next to it is somewhere between brown and green, but I ended up choosing green because brown just made the palette look flat. And I couldn't decide what to use for the sleeves, and in hindsight, I could've chosen something more orange-y, but I didn't have a color print-out with me (out of color ink) and I was pretty much going by memory, and what looked good together. So considering all that, I was feeling okay about my choices as I left the store.
Yesterday, I visited the Japanese Square Enix site for the Lion War for the first time to check out the wallpaper they have, and I thought I'd take a peek at the job pictures, and saw that they have nice clean art now, without the faded look, and now I get to see just how far off my color choices were, and I'm back to fretting about that a bit. I know such substitutions are a reality, and shifting the palette a bit is acceptable, especially since I was already trying to apply the sprite colors to the art (not that I could've found that blue anyway, as it turns out), but I had in my head some idea of trying to be as "authentic" as possible. I know, I know. It'll still look pretty darn awesome anyway, and have way more attention to detail than this guy's costume. (and his friend Tom Green! But I kid, it's nice to see people trying, really. Heh, and as I was searching for that, before just putting it up again myself, I found a forum thread on cosplay.com from a few days ago with a guy wondering how to the do the FFT male chemist hat. Go figure. Maybe it's the season for chemists.) Next time I'll have to pick something where finding the right fabric colors won't be so difficult. ;)
So, after all that pointless worrying (I've got the fabric that I've got. No turning back), I still have to come up with a pattern and put it all together in the next couple of days. I imagine this is how I'll feel after that.
My mom and I went to a 10 o'clock showing of Ratatouille on Tuesday, and as the credits rolled, people started coming in. We were like "Eh? Aren't they a little late?" and it dawned on us, hey, it's the Harry Potter crowd, in for the midnight showing. "Want to stay?" my Mom says, and although I was a little unsure about sitting for another three hours after a two hour movie, I couldn't resist the chance for a free movie. So, we just leaned back, kept a low profile, no one made a fuss, and got to see Harry Potter at midnight for free. Twofer night!
I've snuck into a second movie before, but it involved sneaking past the snack counter to the other side of the building. It involved MOVING. This was the laziest way to sneak into a movie ever. Just sitting there.
Ratatouille might be Pixar's best movie yet, but it's a different kind of movie from The Incredibles, so it's hard to tell. As for Harry Potter, I was a little apprehensive about seeing it, partially because I haven't seen the fourth movie yet, but also because the book is somewhat... torturous. Literally and figuratively! But the movie streamlines out some of the more annoying bits, so it was a more thoroughly enjoyable story. Oh, and Dolores Umbridge is still scarier than Voldemort can ever hope to be.
Also on Tuesday, I finally bought the fabric for the Final Fantasy Tactics Chemist costume that I'm making for Otakon, so now I'm totally committed! Talk about last minute, but if I just knuckle down over the next couple of days, I can do it. I'm still kind of agonizing over color choices a bit, but since I've already bought the fabric (and decent fabric stores are an hour away), it doesn't really matter anymore. I probably shouldn't even mention it (will that stop me? No.).
For the most part I'm modeling the costume on the official art that's been floating around for years. The sepia tone messes up the colors a bit, but I felt like I had a pretty good idea of what they were.
Of course, while the blue in the art looks nice, everyone associates chemists with the blue in the sprite. It's iconic! Although in the art, the blue doesn't cover as much -- it's just the hat and bolero, but it's still important, I'd say.
There were a lot of color options at Hancock Fabrics in the fabric I chose (they didn't really have any linen, and I'd die wearing felt in Baltimore despite the nice 'plush' look, so I went for %100 cotton), although perhaps not quite the hues I was looking for... although I did find one that looked a lot like the blue in the sprite, but I'm not sure if it was the touch of green in it or what, but it just didn't seem natural when you see it in real life, or it just didn't mesh well with the other colors I picked out. The in-game character portrait has a darker shade of blue, but I felt that wasn't right for the overall look (although the woman who did this female chemist costume chose a somewhat darker shade.), so what I ended up with is somewhere in the middle of it all, I guess. (it might look a bit brighter in the picture here)
They certainly didn't have anything like the salmon/coral color in the middle colored stripe, so I picked out an orange as a substitute, and the stripe next to it is somewhere between brown and green, but I ended up choosing green because brown just made the palette look flat. And I couldn't decide what to use for the sleeves, and in hindsight, I could've chosen something more orange-y, but I didn't have a color print-out with me (out of color ink) and I was pretty much going by memory, and what looked good together. So considering all that, I was feeling okay about my choices as I left the store.
Yesterday, I visited the Japanese Square Enix site for the Lion War for the first time to check out the wallpaper they have, and I thought I'd take a peek at the job pictures, and saw that they have nice clean art now, without the faded look, and now I get to see just how far off my color choices were, and I'm back to fretting about that a bit. I know such substitutions are a reality, and shifting the palette a bit is acceptable, especially since I was already trying to apply the sprite colors to the art (not that I could've found that blue anyway, as it turns out), but I had in my head some idea of trying to be as "authentic" as possible. I know, I know. It'll still look pretty darn awesome anyway, and have way more attention to detail than this guy's costume. (and his friend Tom Green! But I kid, it's nice to see people trying, really. Heh, and as I was searching for that, before just putting it up again myself, I found a forum thread on cosplay.com from a few days ago with a guy wondering how to the do the FFT male chemist hat. Go figure. Maybe it's the season for chemists.) Next time I'll have to pick something where finding the right fabric colors won't be so difficult. ;)
So, after all that pointless worrying (I've got the fabric that I've got. No turning back), I still have to come up with a pattern and put it all together in the next couple of days. I imagine this is how I'll feel after that.