greetings and salutations, everyone~!!
this week i'm here to bring you a recap of how i made my champion cynthia cosplay from pokemon diamond and pearl. technically. cynthia is basically everywhere in the pokemon franchise it's like she keeps getting lost but it's okay we love her i'll take any form of media she winds up in
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excuse the poor photo, but here's me in
said cosplay....!!! |
so the thing here was that at first i really wasn't interested in cosplaying cynthia. like, at all, basically. but i have this friend named kumi and he got me into cosplay to begin with (kind of, that's a long story) and i think our conversation went something along these lines:
"you should cosplay cynthia 😍"
"BET"
so the next thing i know i'm here researching what the hell i need to do to work this out!
the thing with franchises as long-running as pokemon is that basically all of the cosplays you see online are from the 2010s, especially with a character as old as cynthia. thankfully she's prolific enough to have cosplays of her sold online but FUCK the quality was SO BAD for the price... like, i'm sorry. 70 EUROS FOR A FLAT COAT AND CARDBOARD ORNAMENTS? my god no thank you
so i constructed a battle plan
figuring out what you need
me being a naive idiot, i decided i was going to mostly DIY this thing. neat, huh?!
so my mom's a seamstress and whenever i need to scope out a project i show it to her and she'll tell me whether i'm being a fucking idiot or whether the project is piss-easy. this time she was vaguely horrified at my plans because apparently sewing a coat from scratch is tough!
as a professional online shopper, i took to aliexpress to get a really cheap and shitty coat to modify!! i totally lost the pics but it was like... long... black... unfortunately for me, it did in fact have a line of buttons instead of a weird clasp like cynthia and in addition it had a bunch of fake pockets i didn't bother to do anything about. but like. we made that into a cynthia coat anyway. that's what this post is about.
in order to properly modify the coat, i'd need a bunch of fur! cynthia's coat has fur on the hem and sleeves along with the fact she has a weird fur choker, so i had to get creative. my mom had an old coat with a faux fur collar so i gutted that thing haha! sorry mom. she didn't use that thing anyway. so after that i was still short for some fur (150x20 cm of it, to be exact) so i took to my go-to resource spot, the local thrift store!!
i live in rovaniemi, finland, which is regarded as the "capital of lapland". it's a great place, really! only problem being the incessant flood of tourists. one of my friends remarked last week that during november-february you're more likely to see a tourist than a local downtown, which would be funny if it weren't actually true. but lucky for me, tourists love buying tacky faux fur products, so i could find them for really cheap!
i bought 3 tacky fur collars for 15€ which ended up amounting perfectly to the 150 cm i needed. i literally took a tape measure with me to the store and looked fucking stupid measuring fur collars in a sea of tourists but the length was so perfect i don't care. i nailed it
after that i had to figure out what to do with cynthia's funky little hair things. i don't know what to call them and none of my friends do either. i figured that the best course of action would be to shape them out of silk clay which is light enough to not come off the wig and still moldable! in order to get the correct shape i got some wooden skewers and small styrofoam balls for skeletons. also got a bunch of crocodile clips i could hot glue the thingies onto!
in addition, i happened to have a bunch of black fabrics and broken nylon stockings on hand i ended up covering the silk clay hair thingies with because FUCK ME silk clay is hard to get smooth. for the gold detailings on both cynthia's heels and her hair thingies i actually used present ribbon in a gold shade because it was the perfect width and happened to be on sale because it's november lolol
later on i'd also use the silk clay to make the ornaments on the coat. the store i went to didn't even have silver paint though so i just got metallic nail polish. catskulls pro tip: if you need a super specific paint shade, just get nail polish. it dries quicker anyway and you can just add a top coat to it. shines real nice too
for the rest of her outfit (i.e. clothing) i used my mom's old dance t-shirt that i have never used but stole off her anyway? also i had a pair of black dress pants on hand from when i bought a pair of pants to try on since i hadn't worn them since 2019. they fit me nicely so i figured they'd do. i also stole a pair of my mom's heels! she's not using them anyway :3
now we've got all the materials, let's move onto the actual making of section before i draw this out any longer
the base clothing layer
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crappy mirror selfie
with the end result! |
i started off making the cosplay with the t-shirt since it was one of the rare things i didn't have to buy!
according to cynthia's concept art her shirt has got a really wide neckline. i think she either has a full-sleeve or a half-sleeve shirt but i really love half-sleeves so i took some creative liberties... (LET ME HAVE THIS ONE)
the shirt i got was a bit loose on me but it had a really big neck opening, almost an off-shoulder since it was a "dancer shirt" or whatever the hell my mom was saying. i had to make it a really deep v-neck somehow? so my solution to this was to just sew a small bunch at where my bra would start. EZ PZ and it looked really nice!
in addition to that, i've lost a ton of weight in the past few years so the shirt was really damn loose on me. while not stated anywhere or really even seen due to cynthia's coat, she's that kind of y2k queen you expect a really tight shirt from so i just sewed the sides smaller and cut out the excess so i had a completely form-fitting shirt with a deep v-neckline!! so sweet!! it made for a really nice look paired with the dress pants and heels, too.
once the first base layer of the outfit was complete, i actually moved onto making her hair thingies! mostly because i was still waiting for the coat and wig to arrive in the mail!!!
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the final thingies on my mess of a
desk before being glued onto
the crocodile clips... how cool |
the... hair.. thingies?
the first thing i did was stick some skewers i found at the back of our kitchen drawer into the styrofoam balls to make a sort of lollipop-like shape. after that i just kind of wrapped a bunch of silk clay around them and rolled them into shape?? the end result was a really choppy-looking vague droplet shape. they were correctly sized, sure, but the foam clay i got was a bunch of different colors and none of them were black. so the plan was like this:
first, i'd spray paint the thingies black with a forgotten bottle of spray paint i had in my bathroom for well over a year! what the fuck did i get that for? i don't remember! after that, i'd use a shiny fabric from an old cardigan to cover them up! unfortunately, the cardigan fabric ended up being so thin and shiny all the lumps of the clay would show through. that looked bad. so i took a pair of old ~20 denier tights and wrapped the things with it for a more matte look, which ended up covering all the lumps!!
after i had covered them in all the fabrics using hot glue and a lot of determination, i cut parts of the christmas gift ribbon and added a bit of hot glue to the ugly side. they're only held together by the backside so i wouldn't risk getting glue on the front, haha.... after that i just hot glued the four thingies into two pairs of thingies and then glued the pair thingies onto crocodile clips. and that's how i managed to make cynthia's hair things!!! fucking hell
the coat and the collar
once the hair thingies were complete, i had received the coat in the mail! shipping was very swift, thank you matkahuolto. thanks to my rigorous measuring, i had sized the coat perfectly!! i had gone for a size S, since it fit my measurements perfectly according to the size chart, but i was a bit anxious since all my life i've been a size M-XL? but then again i've experienced CRAZY weight loss this year, so what do i know!
only problem i had with the coat was the height. while i'm not THAT short, just about 163cm/5'3, i am very short by finnish average and obviously not model tall. the coat was almost dragging on the ground. luckily, cynthia wears crazy heels.... the only thing i had to alter about the cut of the coat was cinching the waist. while the coat was near perfectly sized, it was still a coat, and after removing the buttons the coat originally had it looked rather boxy on me.
now, as one of those body dysmorphia bastards, i wanted my waist to look as small as possible! also to achieve a silhouette closer to the original reference. sewing darts is one of the only things i know how to do properly, so i really lucked out on this one..... the coat already had some darts sewn on the back but they weren't as drastic as i would have liked, so i took them in a bunch and the silhouette ended up perfect!! form-fitting at the waist, just like the shirt. i was very proud of that one.
after i altered the cut i had to sew the clasp and the fur to the coat!! the clasp was easy, just a few stitches and whatever. the furs were a bit tougher and the stitches i used were shit but in my defense it was like 5am after a swedish exam i was like fucking beat you weren't getting me to do anything properly
in order to get the correct fur lengths i had to cut the collar i nicked off mom's old coat in two for the sleeves and had to sew two separate collars onto the hem, but because faux fur is unbelievably enough a furry material it covered up really nicely. i also sewed the last collar into a kind of snake tube and added a snap buckle to it for easy removal, though i might rework it someday!
the coat ornaments
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coat ornament painting progress.
you can see where i tried to
press a snap buckle into the backs
of the oval gems.... |
once all the fur was (poorly) sewn in place i had to figure out the ornaments somehow. my original idea was to use eva foam sheets but they were 2D and floppy. i hated them. i happened to have leftover foam clay from the hair thingies so i figured, smoothness be damned! let's make the ornaments with this stuff.
i shaped two little ovals and a big droplet i had sized using paper! they came out pretty smooth because i literally rolled the foam clay into a flat sheet and then just placed it over the choppy shape. it came out nice enough! after that i used silver nail polish to paint them because they had no silver paint. and that's fine the nail polish is shinier and cheaper anyway haha. i ran out of top coat since i like to cover anything i paint with that stuff since decoupage is stickier, dries slower, is more expensive, more annoying and literally just looks like fucking cum but the ornaments were totally fine even without a top coat
as for the way i attached the ornaments to the coat, i wanted them to be detachable so i could wash the coat without further issues (I AM SO TIRED OF SPRAYING MY COSPLAYS WITH VODKA). this ended up with me kind of shooting myself in the foot but also not? i attached the gems by hot gluing snap buckles to them and sewing the other halves to the coat, but this led to the gems constantly spinning out of place and even getting detached at some points... also, hot glue really doesn't stick to foam clay. they're totally fine, but i might sew them on at some point or attach them with a pin or something.
for the droplet i had glued a little clasp onto the ornament and hung it off the clasp on the coat so the placement was fine, but that ended up with the droplet falling off too. in fact, at the time of writing, i have already worn the cosplay out and actually lost the droplet. i had to make a new one with foam clay again. i've yet to figure out how i'll attach the droplet this time, but i'm placing my bets on hot gluing a safety pin to the ornament and hooking the pin through the clasp, haha.
the shoes
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the finished product along with all
my crafting debris~~~ lovely |
it was time for the heels... so basically, i just had a pair of heels i nicked from my mom for my nemu aohitsugi cosplay. the heels are BRUTAL and have a 10cm heel with a 2cm platform and they kill my feet so easily but i look so nice wearing them.. and without them both the coat and the pants drag on the floor. so basically, the heels were a must and i just sucked it up! i did put some gel pads i got from my mom in there, but they still kind of hurt. i was able to spend the day in cosplay with them, though!
as for the gold stripes, i wanted to keep the shoes "reusable" i.e. i couldn't glue shit on. so i whipped out my own version of duct tape: two sided extra-strength tape! i use this shit for basically everything and it's saved both me and my friends at conventions SO many times. i applied a bit of tape to a strip of present ribbon and then just taped it onto the shoe. if it gets damaged, i can replace it since i have a huge discount roll of ribbon. and if i want to take it off, i can just peel it off without a hassle! how clever, hm?
conclusion
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a really shitty showcase pic
i took for my friends...
yikes |
after i finished things up with the heels, my full outfit was done! obviously i still had to style the wig, but cynthia is basic enough i didn't even have to touch my got2b glued!! mostly because i had recently ran out of hairspray. i ended up holding the wig together for my cosplay meet-up with a few hairpins and a dream and honestly it went great! only issue with the wig was the general issues you tend to have with long wigs, i have yet to find out how to keep them from getting tangled to hell and back. my firefly cosplay is not doing okay.
after that, my cynthia cosplay was complete~!! i was really proud of it since it's my first ever DIY cosplay, despite consisting mostly of alterations and whatnot. i think it came out really nice~ dare i say even better than a 70€ ezcosplay catastrophe? i can't say cheaper, since i did scavenge a lot of materials used, but it looks cool anyway and i can still be proud of it. for props i wanted to make her lipstick with the mega evolution stone but i didn't have a suitable lipstick for a base... i ended up running to a nearby grocery store and picking out a clip-'n-go pokeball from the toy aisle. i think it's cool how pokemon is a franchise i can literally pick up cosplay props for at the goddamn grocery store.
anyway!! that's about it for this "making-of" recap. very fun time all around, even if connected to some icky memories. i might do a proper tutorial on how you can make your own cosplay because this is basically a really convoluted essay and is padded with a ton of fluff and personal anecdotes and a tutorial even an idiot could understand would probably be good since the cynthia cosplays on the market fucking suck. so stay tuned for that maybe! i don't know what or when my next post will be but it will come in time. pleasant surprise, if you will.
thanks everyone, stay fresh
yours truly,
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