Wai-con 2010
Wai-con was the weekend before last. (Today's post brought to you by the experience of receiving a rent inspection notice three days after the con and realising a) you are not getting anything but cleaning done until next week, and b) you should just thank your lucky stars it didn't happen last week. House looks much neater now though ;)
I'm hitting the point with Wai-cons where the majority of what I have to say about them starts to get a bit repetitive* - we came, we saw, we cosplayed, we sold lots of stuff, we won prizes, we (mostly) failed to melt in the heat**, we took photos, we caught up with friends*** - we basically had an awesome time.
*A few more, and pointing out the repetition is going to be a bit repetitive - oooh, recursion!
**Thank god we brought a standing fan to stick behind the stall this year. I'm all for having the con in January rather than December, but the weather is not on our side this time of year, and Ky has this real neck-to-ankle thing going on that is not well compatible with the heat.
***Sometimes in something of a drive-through fashion as people rushed past in opposite directions. Cons, they keep you busy.
So let's get straight down to the photos.
For Saturday, velithya and I were cosplaying Overture Sol and Ky.
Yeah, that there costume would be the main reason I haven’t posted any new fic since December. >.>;
A few quick construction notes: So I have a new top contender for 'most difficult costume I've ever made'. I have developed a new appreciation for the many uses of iron-on interfacing and vinyl printing, and only slightly less loathing of clay-work. Technically there are a couple of details still incomplete - I didn’t have time to do the design on the back of the cape and had to recycle the boots from my other Ky costume, but I’ll probably try to get them done for photoshoot purposes later in the year. We both opted to stick with the Fuuenken and Fuuraiken rather than the ‘proper’ Overture weapons - partially due to time constraints (the Fuuraiken was mostly finished months ago), partially due to apathy (‘eh, we like the GGX weapons better anyway’), and partially because it was an excuse to finally get a Fuuenken made for velithya - something we achieved, start to finish, in the space of something like 14 hours of work in the weekend before the con. Given that weapons usually take me weeks, if not months, I am inordinately pleased we pulled it off. :3
In the weirdest stroke of luck of all 2009, I actually managed to track down the exact font used for the text on Ky’s costume. It’s called yawnovision - very regal-sounding and all that. Scan from the artbook for comparison.
Thanks are also owed to pinneagig for vectorising the designs for the vinyl printing for me, and to cielrose for wig-styling. <3
Costumes went down well on the day, which is to say WE WON BEST GROUP! :3
pinneagig's (my sister/housemate/general partner-in-crime, though not in cosplay this year) big cosplay project for this year was Lina Inverse:
I need to point at those big shoulder pauldrons and mention that she 1) has never done any serious armour/sheet plastic work before, and 2) thanks to a supplier error, was working with 1mm sheet plastic instead of the usual .5mm kind which is far more cooperative when being asked to bend into difficult shapes. She can actually do a disturbingly good Naga-laugh, but there was no way she was doing that costume, so settled for doing a (in my only-slightly-biased opinion) a very nice rendition of the Slayers first-season opening theme up on stage.
She took out the Craftmanship Award that day, and I would call it very well deserved too.
The final highlight of the day was getting to catch up with ayyu - an A.B.A. cosplayer I met at the Wai-con ball earlier in the year. Around the end of the day (when things had calmed down, and the weather was no longer trying to melt us where we stood), we all nipped outside to take some photos.
The hilarious part about all this is that last year, if you remember, my group consisted of velithya as Sol, me as a blonde with a white and blue outfit, and an A.B.A. cosplayer (then jaseroque, who has since moved to Japan):
This year?
What are the odds, huh? ;)
ayyu's Paracelsus was unfortunately broken earlier during the con, but we figured, well, hey, let's take a couple of shots of a battle going badly wrong for poor A.B.A.
I have this weird fondness for a lot of the random, unposed shots we took that day (also: figuring out how to pose the key, remembering glasses, etc). Trying to keep the post from getting too photo heavy here though.
Because we were a safe distance from the con and its irritatingly rigid PG-13 policy, it was high time for some Sol/Ky shots:
This is my favourite. I still have a bunch left to edit, but will be saving those for a solxky post, hopefully in the very near future.
The big highlight that was new and different this year was the Eminence concert on Saturday night - and I really didn't realise just how much I was going to love the performance until we were were there. The evening started with the My Neighbour Totoro theme and ended with Super Mario - just to give you an idea of the range, and honestly, everything they played in between was gorgeous. But there's an extra layer of fannish squee to hearing songs you know - and an extra double-layer on top of that when it's connected to a movie or a game you love, so the high point of the night for me was The Dream That Time Dreams from Chrono Cross. I'm not much of a CC fan, but Chrono Trigger was the first real RPG I ever played and will probably always be one of my all time favourites, and what I'd forgotten about that particular piece is that it's actually a remix of the Chrono Trigger theme, extended with some beautiful orchestral segments. *_* It's a crying shame none of the CDs for sale after the event (and we bought *two*) had their rendition of that particular song. We have the in-game mp3 of it, but it doesn't begin to measure up.
For Sunday I was recyling my other Ky costume from Smash:
Photo by amenokitarou (<3) who was cosplaying Sora that day - and given that I still had this crack idea for a GG/KH crossover that never went anywhere, I could not resist dragging him outside to snap a few shots of Ky and Sora together.
Various bad jokes were made about what their hypothetical combo move would have been called.
It isn't until I saw these pics afterwards that it dawned on me just how ridiculously not-to-scale we are there. XD; I am sadly a little short to make a really good Ky. Maybe we can claim there was some kind of Wonderland incident?
A couple semi-posed shots I couldn't resist: reminding amenokitarou he'd forgotten he still had a '!!1!' speech-bubble-on-a-stick in his hair (bought at the con from a neat little stall that was also doing great sales in the fake moustache business). Maybe he was just surprised to see me?
Meanwhile, velithya was cosplaying my first ever anime crush Trunks from Dragonball - and as I discovered to general amusement a couple of years ago, Ky and Trunks just happen to have the same voice actor. So I had to get a couple of pics of them together too.
Polite pretty boys with swords and a weird habit of scrawling 'HOPE' on things (like, say, belt buckles and time machines) and saving the world in their teen years. Possibly Takeshi Kusao has been slightly typecast?
Didn't take any prizes that day, but considering that I was recyling the previous day's prop (and boots), I cannot really complain. ^^;
pinneagig's Sunday costume was Dissidia!Tifa. The informed among you will spot the problem with this - there is no Tifa in Dissidia, but pinneagig didn't have any particular plans for that day, and she enjoyed the hell out of the game and had heard there'd be a Dissidia group around on Sunday. So she pulled out her old FFVII Tifa costume, had a look at her original Amano art, added some random strips of torn fabric and a lot of extra beads and dangly things and came up with this:
Managed to get a couple of snaps of her with the Squall (cielrose) and Terra (clamwings) from the group too.
One last photo: I am not quite sure how I got into the situation below, but it was about that time of the con.
(also featuring drayke_ as Link)
So that was about it for Waicon 2010. As always, we owe a lot of gratitude to everyone who helped mind our table during the day, especially Ken and velithya.
We have lots of bit photoshoot plans for these costumes. Going to wait until the weather's cooled down a bit though, 35+ degree heat is not good cosplay weather.
I'm hitting the point with Wai-cons where the majority of what I have to say about them starts to get a bit repetitive* - we came, we saw, we cosplayed, we sold lots of stuff, we won prizes, we (mostly) failed to melt in the heat**, we took photos, we caught up with friends*** - we basically had an awesome time.
*A few more, and pointing out the repetition is going to be a bit repetitive - oooh, recursion!
**Thank god we brought a standing fan to stick behind the stall this year. I'm all for having the con in January rather than December, but the weather is not on our side this time of year, and Ky has this real neck-to-ankle thing going on that is not well compatible with the heat.
***Sometimes in something of a drive-through fashion as people rushed past in opposite directions. Cons, they keep you busy.
So let's get straight down to the photos.
For Saturday, velithya and I were cosplaying Overture Sol and Ky.
Yeah, that there costume would be the main reason I haven’t posted any new fic since December. >.>;
A few quick construction notes: So I have a new top contender for 'most difficult costume I've ever made'. I have developed a new appreciation for the many uses of iron-on interfacing and vinyl printing, and only slightly less loathing of clay-work. Technically there are a couple of details still incomplete - I didn’t have time to do the design on the back of the cape and had to recycle the boots from my other Ky costume, but I’ll probably try to get them done for photoshoot purposes later in the year. We both opted to stick with the Fuuenken and Fuuraiken rather than the ‘proper’ Overture weapons - partially due to time constraints (the Fuuraiken was mostly finished months ago), partially due to apathy (‘eh, we like the GGX weapons better anyway’), and partially because it was an excuse to finally get a Fuuenken made for velithya - something we achieved, start to finish, in the space of something like 14 hours of work in the weekend before the con. Given that weapons usually take me weeks, if not months, I am inordinately pleased we pulled it off. :3
In the weirdest stroke of luck of all 2009, I actually managed to track down the exact font used for the text on Ky’s costume. It’s called yawnovision - very regal-sounding and all that. Scan from the artbook for comparison.
Thanks are also owed to pinneagig for vectorising the designs for the vinyl printing for me, and to cielrose for wig-styling. <3
Costumes went down well on the day, which is to say WE WON BEST GROUP! :3
pinneagig's (my sister/housemate/general partner-in-crime, though not in cosplay this year) big cosplay project for this year was Lina Inverse:
I need to point at those big shoulder pauldrons and mention that she 1) has never done any serious armour/sheet plastic work before, and 2) thanks to a supplier error, was working with 1mm sheet plastic instead of the usual .5mm kind which is far more cooperative when being asked to bend into difficult shapes. She can actually do a disturbingly good Naga-laugh, but there was no way she was doing that costume, so settled for doing a (in my only-slightly-biased opinion) a very nice rendition of the Slayers first-season opening theme up on stage.
She took out the Craftmanship Award that day, and I would call it very well deserved too.
The final highlight of the day was getting to catch up with ayyu - an A.B.A. cosplayer I met at the Wai-con ball earlier in the year. Around the end of the day (when things had calmed down, and the weather was no longer trying to melt us where we stood), we all nipped outside to take some photos.
The hilarious part about all this is that last year, if you remember, my group consisted of velithya as Sol, me as a blonde with a white and blue outfit, and an A.B.A. cosplayer (then jaseroque, who has since moved to Japan):
This year?
What are the odds, huh? ;)
ayyu's Paracelsus was unfortunately broken earlier during the con, but we figured, well, hey, let's take a couple of shots of a battle going badly wrong for poor A.B.A.
I have this weird fondness for a lot of the random, unposed shots we took that day (also: figuring out how to pose the key, remembering glasses, etc). Trying to keep the post from getting too photo heavy here though.
Because we were a safe distance from the con and its irritatingly rigid PG-13 policy, it was high time for some Sol/Ky shots:
This is my favourite. I still have a bunch left to edit, but will be saving those for a solxky post, hopefully in the very near future.
The big highlight that was new and different this year was the Eminence concert on Saturday night - and I really didn't realise just how much I was going to love the performance until we were were there. The evening started with the My Neighbour Totoro theme and ended with Super Mario - just to give you an idea of the range, and honestly, everything they played in between was gorgeous. But there's an extra layer of fannish squee to hearing songs you know - and an extra double-layer on top of that when it's connected to a movie or a game you love, so the high point of the night for me was The Dream That Time Dreams from Chrono Cross. I'm not much of a CC fan, but Chrono Trigger was the first real RPG I ever played and will probably always be one of my all time favourites, and what I'd forgotten about that particular piece is that it's actually a remix of the Chrono Trigger theme, extended with some beautiful orchestral segments. *_* It's a crying shame none of the CDs for sale after the event (and we bought *two*) had their rendition of that particular song. We have the in-game mp3 of it, but it doesn't begin to measure up.
For Sunday I was recyling my other Ky costume from Smash:
Photo by amenokitarou (<3) who was cosplaying Sora that day - and given that I still had this crack idea for a GG/KH crossover that never went anywhere, I could not resist dragging him outside to snap a few shots of Ky and Sora together.
Various bad jokes were made about what their hypothetical combo move would have been called.
It isn't until I saw these pics afterwards that it dawned on me just how ridiculously not-to-scale we are there. XD; I am sadly a little short to make a really good Ky. Maybe we can claim there was some kind of Wonderland incident?
A couple semi-posed shots I couldn't resist: reminding amenokitarou he'd forgotten he still had a '!!1!' speech-bubble-on-a-stick in his hair (bought at the con from a neat little stall that was also doing great sales in the fake moustache business). Maybe he was just surprised to see me?
Meanwhile, velithya was cosplaying my first ever anime crush Trunks from Dragonball - and as I discovered to general amusement a couple of years ago, Ky and Trunks just happen to have the same voice actor. So I had to get a couple of pics of them together too.
Polite pretty boys with swords and a weird habit of scrawling 'HOPE' on things (like, say, belt buckles and time machines) and saving the world in their teen years. Possibly Takeshi Kusao has been slightly typecast?
Didn't take any prizes that day, but considering that I was recyling the previous day's prop (and boots), I cannot really complain. ^^;
pinneagig's Sunday costume was Dissidia!Tifa. The informed among you will spot the problem with this - there is no Tifa in Dissidia, but pinneagig didn't have any particular plans for that day, and she enjoyed the hell out of the game and had heard there'd be a Dissidia group around on Sunday. So she pulled out her old FFVII Tifa costume, had a look at her original Amano art, added some random strips of torn fabric and a lot of extra beads and dangly things and came up with this:
Managed to get a couple of snaps of her with the Squall (cielrose) and Terra (clamwings) from the group too.
One last photo: I am not quite sure how I got into the situation below, but it was about that time of the con.
(also featuring drayke_ as Link)
So that was about it for Waicon 2010. As always, we owe a lot of gratitude to everyone who helped mind our table during the day, especially Ken and velithya.
We have lots of bit photoshoot plans for these costumes. Going to wait until the weather's cooled down a bit though, 35+ degree heat is not good cosplay weather.