Mike's Ike costume is going well though I'm a bit behind schedule. The prototype for the jacket is done and I'm ready to start cutting the final pieces for it. We went through several phases of fitting. The only thing that I really had trouble with was the collar. It wasn't until the third try that I got the right idea for how to do it. Mike's a little confused by the whole thing. He's wondering why his jacket is white instead of blue. I keep having to explain that its a prototype, lol.

wig - 50%

I have the wig. I just need to style it

green head band - 0%

cape - 100%

Did this in a couple hours

From Cosplay Ike, the Making Of

blue jacket - 40%

The prototype is complete but now I need to make the final piece. It has a lot of trim so it will take some time to make.

From Cosplay Ike, the Making Of

gloves - 0%
red skirt - 50-100%

I intend to cut up my old Red Link costume to be used for the skirt. Or might not cut it up at all and Mike can just wear it underneath his jacket.

pauldron, chest piece - 5%

I created the patterns for the pauldron and chest leather piece. Both pieces will be made out of craft foam and the belt will be made out of fabric similar to my TP Link costume

main belt - 0%

This piece won't take long to make

sword belt - 0%

This piece won't take long to make either

pants - 90%

Pants are mostly done. But they're fitting a little loose so I'll probably bring them in a bit.

boots - 0%

These involve a few pieces. Brown boots with black legging pieces and metal tips. I haven't found brown boots yet. If I can't find any, then I wont make the boot leggings/tips and he can just wear my black knee high boots

sword - 100%

Found a sword that looks almost exactly like Ike's from the party store

From Cosplay Ike, the Making Of

Today I'm a quarter of a century.

my top tracks from the last 12 months according to last.fm:

1. Chrono Cross - Dream of the Shore Bordering Another

2. Final Fantasy IX - Crossing those Hills

3. Chrono Cross - Home Village of Arni

4. Lee Holdridge - I Will Remember You Still

5. Kelly Sweet - Giorno Dpop Giorno

6. Final Fantasy X - The SIght of Spira

7. Final Fantasy IX - Freyja's Theme

8. Final Fantasy X - Besaid Island

9. Final Fantasy V - Ahead On Our Way

10. Chrono Trigger - Secrets of the Forest

11. Paul Schwartz - Bel Di

12. Sasha Lazard - Princess Mononoke

13. Kelly Sweet - I Will Be Waiting

14. Final Fantasy VII - Tifa's Theme

15. Kelly Sweet - Caresse Sur L'Ocean

cool apps/services I've been using:

• Google Reader - omg i love reader and i'm new to it this year

• iTunes

• Last.fm

• Google Apps - Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Sites

• Adobe Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, Corel Painter X

• Google Picasa and Picasa Web Albums with face recognition

• Firefox with these notable plugins: Gmarks, Firebug, Web Developer Toolbar

• Tortoise SVN

Stuff I've learned this year:

Learned XML, XSL and started to use that on PD to separate data, PHP code, and presentation logic.

More experience with Linux

Using Tortoise SVN to version control my websites

Micheal Toews, Dan Hummel, and I attended Anime Expo which was located in downtown LA. We made the 7+ hour drive down from San Jose for this con. We were all AX virgins. We came away with lukewarm feelings about the experience.

Cosplay

There was a lot of really good cosplay. About the same as what's at Fanime. You can see my album of photos at:
http://picasaweb.google.com/bogusred/AnimeExpo2008

There were a lot of good Legend of Zelda cosplayers:

The cosplay gatherings were pretty good but I think it would be great if the info desks knew about them and could help answer questions about them. I know the gatherings are organized by attendees, usually on cosplay.com, but it would have been nice if there was at least a sign near the entrance saying where all the gatherings were, like with what they did at Fanime. There was a lot of confusion about where the Legend of Zelda cosplay gathering was supposed to be at. Part of this is because this was the first year AX was at the LA Convention Center, so people didn't know where a good place for the gathering was.

Convention

There were a LOT of people. It was cool to be a part of something so big, but it got rather crowded at times. I wanted to attend the masquerade, however, the line for tickets was really long, wrapping around the building out in the hot sun! No way were we going to stand in that line.

The staff were also not informed enough about how to obtain tickets for masquerade. We got three different answers from staff about where to go for tickets and what the process was. Also the information in the AX booklet was confusing.

That's another thing. AX really needs to get professional writers to explain information on their websites and in their booklets.AX's website was awful . It took me forever to figure out how to get the schedule online. Their website is really hard to navigate and the information on each page was poorly organized. Not to mention their web site design was bad. I thought the way they organized the schedule itself was fairly easy to read. But everything else was hard to understand.

We did see a really good movie showing in one of the rooms, but the projector appeared to be going bad as 2/3rds of the way through, the projector got dim. It was a 35mm movie I believe.

The Gong show was kind of cool.

The panel line up did not seem particularly interesting. I don't think I saw a single cosplay related panel. There were a couple of art panels but I ended up not going to any as none of them really peaked my interest.

Artists alley was amazing. The skill level of the artists and the amount of artists was much larger than that at Fanime. I ended up buying a lot of art. And one of the artists was one I had seen on DeviantArt. It was kind of cool to meet him in person.

Micheal said the lineup of video showings was not as good as Fanime. And he didn't even like Fanime's lineup this year so I guess AX's must have been pretty bad.

Hotel

We stayed at the LA Athletic Club and we most likely wont stay there again.

First off, I reserved my hotel room through the AX website. I managed to navigate through their really poorly made web app to reserve a room and it said the LA Athletic club rooms were 3 people per room. It asked whether I wanted a room with one bed or two beds and I selected two. But when we arrived at the LAAC they said the room only has one bed (a king) and that all of their rooms are like that. WTF?

The lobby area and breakfast area looked really nice. But our room was kind of lacking. The faucets were leaky, the shower head didn't work well, the mini fridge barely worked, and the only internet access they had was a really flaky wireless connection that kept dropping off every five minutes. We could only get a few bars of signal strength with it. Why, why, why, couldn't they have a wired connection? This hotel was so ancient.

One thing that was good though was the shuttle system. If you stay at one of the convention center's list of preferred hotels, there is a shuttle service that will run to and from the hotels and the convention center. This system worked really nicely.

Food

My friends and I were not too impressed with downtown LA. It was very difficult to find a restaurant to eat at. We were hoping to just be able to walk down the streets and find a place to eat. But the area seemed rather deserted and almost everything was closed. Granted, it was on 4th of July weekend, but still, there should have been more places opened. Not to mention the place was filthy. A lot like San Francisco.

We did find a really nice sit down restaurant called Wokcano that serves Japanese, Thai, and Chinese food. It was really good. I'd recommend it if you are in the downtown LA area.

My Cosplay Experience

Cosplaying was fun but it wasn't as fun as Fanime. At Fanime, random fangirls would come up to me and hug me. Not so much of that at AX. I think the maturity level at AX is probably much higher.

I only wore my costume on Friday and Saturday. By mid-day Saturday my chainmail started breaking. I could hear and feel the rings popping off throughout the day. By the evening my chain-mail was drooping down my arms. I went back to the hotel room and took it off. I'll need to do quite a bit of work to repair it.

It was really painful carrying around the shield on my back with the chain-mail on. I had indentations in my shoulders from the rings. But carrying it on my back was way better than on my arm the whole day. The darn thing is really heavy.

My sword worked well. I had no problems with it.

There was a really good Princess Zelda and Gannon from Twilight Princess. I had signed up and pre-paid for a photo shoot and invited the two of them to come along. Unfortunately, my photographer stood me up so I couldn't get good photos taken. But here's a photo taken of us with my camera.

So in the end...

So all-in-all it was fun but perhaps not worth the 7+ hour drive. We may or may not attend next year. Perhaps we will just stick toFanime.

AnimeExpo is this weekend. Some friends and I will be making the 6+ hour drive down to LA on Thursday night. I'm really excited. I've never been to an Anime con other than Fanime.

I've been feverishly working on my Link costume to get it finished in time for the con. Originally I was going to be in the Masquerade. However, a week ago I found out that if I wanted to be considered for a craftsmanship award I needed to sign up for a craftsmanship meeting. Sign ups for that happen on Thursday only and since I'm only going to be there Friday-Sunday, there would be no way for me to get one. So I dropped out :( But maybe I can compete next year.

The first thing I've been working on is the Chainmail. I've finished the upper chainmail shirt and its ready to wear. I'm still working on the skirt. I don't think I'll have enough rings nor the time to make it all into one long shirt piece. But I think I'll at least have the upper chainmail that shows. Here's a picture of what it looks like. I'll be working on the skirt during the road trip down and late at night in my hotel room.


Next, I needed to remake that crappy sorry excuse for a gauntlet. The first one I had made really quick before the D-Day event at SJSU and then tried to rush it again for Fanime. It was complete enough to wear, but it looked like crap. Other Twilight Princess Links at FanimeCon had much better one's than mine.

I decided to scrap it except for the straps. I made a new one out of craft foam and it turned out wonderfully. I then painted it using Liquitex professional paints. I'll post a more detailed blog entry later on how this piece was made. Check it out...

Lastly, I decided my sword needed some reworking. I ripped off the hilt and started working on a new one out of craft foam. But I'm a little worred because the blade may fall off the hilt if I'm not too careful with it. I still have a lot of work left to do on this so I don't have any pictures to share yet. I'm staying up late tonight and working all day tomorrow on it. Hopefully it will be done before I hit the road!

UPDATE @ 3:30am July 3rd

Ok so when I started working on this sword, I was really unsure and many times through I was freaking out and thoughts like  "Man... there's no way this is going to work...," "how the heck am I going to do this?,"  "I have no idea what I'm doing," and "You are an idiot for doing this at the last minute" kept popping into my head.

But now my sword is actually starting to come together nicely. There will be many details that will be left out in the interest of time including the little gold jewel, some sculpting on the handle, etc, but I can always add those later. All that's left is to wrap a piece of foam around the handle portion and paint everything. (Please note that the color you see on the hilt is the color of the craft foam and will not be the final color.)

There are also a few proportional issues with the hilt. Namely, the blade is too small for that big hilt. But you know what, craft foam is hard to work with! And I think it looks pretty good.

If time allows, I'll post an updated photo tomorrow.

Someone recently asked me about my Link wig so I thought I'd post some details. Basically I bought a wig and made some simple modifications to it. This entry will explain the details...

The wig I use is a Mona Lisa Collection wig. I don't know which model it is (the tag doesn't say), but you can probably find it online somewhere. I happened to come across it at a kiosk at a local mall. I think I paid around $30 USD for it. The wig works great. It has a nice color and a somewhat realistic hair texture. It doesn't look like those cheap wigs that are really shiny.

The only thing it was missing was the side burn hair that Link has that dangles on the sides. I was able to add this myself in a few easy simple steps. For this, you'll need some scrap cotton like fabric such as muslin, thread (any color), a sewing machine, your wig, and another wig to cut hair from.

You'll need another wig of a similar color with long hair that you are willing to cut pieces from. I happened to have a wig that I was using for spare hair already. It is a much cheaper wig that I paid about $20 for and has much longer hair on it.

Next you'll need to cut a chunk of the hair from your spare parts wig. Be sure that it is a few inches longer than you want it to hang. The reason for this is you'll be folding the hair over to make the hair less likely to come out of the stitches.

Then, lay down the hair on a strip of muslin or similar fabric with an inch or so hanging off of the strip. It doesn't matter a whole lot what color the fabric is because it wont be visible.

Then set your sewing machine to a strait stitch at the smallest stitch setting. Then just start stitching back and forth like crazy. You'll need to go over the area several times to make sure the hair doesn't come loose.

Once you do that, fold the fabric in half so that the other end of the hair is pointing down. Now stitch some more with your sewing machine. Doing this helps to keep the hair from coming out. Trim some of the excess hair from the folded end.

Once you've got your strip, you can sew it to your wig. Just hand sew it into place where you want it. The black thread is from the sewing machine. You can see how much I stitched back and forth. The red at the bottom is where I attached the strip to the wig.

You'll likely want to trim the hair to give it a more natural edge. Don't just go strait across. Give it some layering.

And that's all there is to it! Now you can look smexy just like Link.

I had mentioned in a previous blog post a bit about the troubles I had with my last attempt at making Chain Mail for my Twilight Princess Link costume. I just got my new rings today and wanted to give an update on the status.

Strike 1
The first thing I tried was to buy galvanized fencing wire and make the rings myself spinning the wire on a dowel rod connected to a power drill. I bought many of the supplies but a friend of mine with experience making maille talked me into buying my rings online instead.

Strike 2
I purchased 14 gauge 1/4inch diameter rings from TheRingLord.com in Brass. While I was pleased with the color, I had trouble working with the rings. It was quite difficult to put two 4-in-1s together and it was almost impossible to put two lengths together. I attempted to just do a 4 ring tall length around the trim of my tunic but the weight of the metal was too much and made the tunic sag.

Hit?
So then I decided to order rings at a higher gauge (thinner) with a larger diameter, again from TheRingLord.com. I went for the 16 gauge 3/8th inch brass rings. They arrived today and already I've created almost the same amount of maille that took me weeks to do with the 14 g 1/4inch rings. My only concern is that since the 16 G is so thin, its hard to meet the edges when closing the rings and there is opportunity for some of the rings to come undone. I'm also not sure how well it will all hold once I make a whole suit out of it. The suit will probably end up being super light. Which is good since I'll be wearing the costume all day long at the con. If I run into problems with the new maille I will post it in my blog.

If I could go back in time and change my order, I'd probably go with the 14 G 3/8th rings instead.

At the rate I'm able to make the maille, I can probably have the shirt and the skirt done in time for AX.

Below is a picture showing the 14 g 1/4th inch rings against the 16 g 3/8ths at the bottom. I think the smaller rings look more like real maille since there isn't as much gapping. But I think this is good enough for a costume. Again, note that the top half took me weeks to make where as the bottom half took me one night.

Yesterday was Drawing Day! What's Drawing Day? Well its basically a day that this guy made up to promote drawing and more online art community activity. Which I thought was pretty cool so I enrolledPaperDemon as an official participant in the event. We were listed as a Gold Supporter because of the prominent exposure we had on our site for Drawing Day.

Here's my main submission for Drawing Day. I hadn't done any really good Link illustrations in a while so I thought this would be a good time to do one:


I had so much fun at FanimeCon this year that I decided to go with some friends to AnimeExpo in LA. So if you'll be attending that con, be sure to look for me! I signed up for a photo shoot with Consplayers.com to get some nice professional photos of my costume. This means there's even more pressure to make sure my costume looks fantastic.

There are a couple things I will attempt to fix in my Link costume before the con. First, my gauntlet is a piece of crap. Every TP Link at Fanime had a better one than me. I found a great tutorial online for making a similar armor piece out of craft foam. I've also got my acrylic paint handy for adding details and weathering. Plus this should not take too long to make compared to other parts of my costume.

Secondly, the hilt of my sword. The blade looks fine but the hilt is not the right shape or color. I'd like to see if I can figure out a way to make a better hilt out of craft foam. I remember going to a panel in 2001 at Fanime hosted by the Stitchin' Babes in which they described their process of making props out of craft foam. But it's not the same method as described on many tutorials online. Theyactually glued layers and layers and layers of craft foam together. Then carved it the way they wanted, sanded it to get finer smooth shaping, then sealed it and painted it. The result was a very light weight 3D weapon. You could use this method for creating really big props. Unfortunately, I don't have all the details of this technique and have not had much luck finding a tutorial for this process online. I did find a tutorial though on using craft foam for making armor but this isn't the same process because it doesn't involve gluing many many layers and carving them. Perhaps I could give it a try on my own. I think my biggest question is what glue to use. What kind of glue would be able to hold multiple layers of craft foam together without falling apart when being carved/sanded?

The next thing is the chain mail. I did start some chain mail a couple months back but it failed because the rings were too thick and too small to work with to create a big enough length. So I've ordered some thinner, bigger rings. I know the pattern fairly well now so I think I can make the mail pretty fast and easily. I wont make a whole shirt, just enough for a half shirt for the parts that show.

I will update my blog with relevant news on my costume in the coming weeks. Only three more weekends left until AnimeExpo!

It had been 5 years since I last went to FanimeCon.

I was surprised by the number of cosplayers. I think most people were in costume of some kind. Back when I first started going to the con, maybe only 15-20% of attendees cosplayed. I was also impressed with the quality of the cosplay. Most of the cosplay I saw back when I first went to Fanime in 2001 was really crappy. They were mostly costumes people put together at the last minute.  But this year a lot of people had really fantastic costumes. I took almost 300 pictures at the con. Seeing all of the greatcosplay really inspired me to want to make more costumes and do even better next time.

My favorite costumes were the creative ones. Like this costume of Cloud in drag. Remember the part in Final Fantasy VII where you have to dress Cloud like a girl so he can pass as a prostitute?

Popular cosplays were Naruto series, Mario brothers, Legend of Zelda, Chobits Persacomps, characters from Final Fantasy VII (mostly the new generation stuff like advent children and the new spin off games). 

Link was popular and I think I got a photo of almost every single one at the con. I saw Links from Wind Waker, Twilight Princess, and Ocarina of Time. There was even a WW Link in his pajamas which was super cute.

And whenever Link and Zelda stood next to each other, the cameras started shooting like crazy. I saw three Princess Zelda's at the con and they all looked great. But I think this one was the best one.

There was one Link in particular that I had a couple of memorable moments with. I took a photo of him and then my friend Potter said I should get a photo of the two of us battling. I asked him "Hi Link, can we battle?" And he said, "Oh... No sorry" and I said "No, I mean for a photo." And he said "Oh!Ok !" I guess he was afraid of me and thought I meant to really fight? One other time, my friends and I and some other people were on a crowded elevator. It stopped at a floor and the same Link walks on and Potter jokingly says to him "Oh sorry, no Links allowed on this elevator." And he walked off of it! Everyone felt bad for him. Link, I'm sorry my friend was so mean to you!

If there's one thing I've noticed, it's that girls LOVE Link. If you are a guy and want to get some love at the con, cosplay as a decent Link and random girls will glomp you and hug you. I think I got hugged by 30 different girls and even a few guys. A lot of people wanted to get their picture taken with Link also. I really enjoyed playing the part of Link and getting my picture taken. Though I think I could have done some better poses. I look too girly in my pictures. I will practice some better poses before the next con.

There was this one group of girls that kept sneaking up behind me and yelling "Hey! Listen!" It wasn't until the third time that I finally got what they meant. They were imitating the annoying fairy, Navi, from Ocarina of Time who always says "Hey! Listen!" When she has something important to say. Other hi-jinks were abound at the con as well. There was a game of "Link tag" going on Sunday at one point.

So I'm feeling depressed that the con is all over. I'm starting to make plans with my friends to attend AnimeExpo in July. I'm also starting to think about what to cosplay for next year. I'd like to do what i did last time and create my costume for Halloween then reuse it at Fanime. So far my plan is to create an Ike (from Fire Emblem) costume for Mike to wear. I may create a simple costume for myself or I may not even go through the trouble of creating a new costume. I have so many other projects right now I shouldn't start another one.

My Link costume still needs some work. My arm guard thingy that goes on the sword hand looks like total crap. I put it together really quickly so that's why it looks crappy. I will work on an improved version before the next con. I also want to try and create a new hilt for my sword. The chain mail situation doesn't look good. I had created enough for the rims of my tunic but when I attached them it made the tunic sag and look awful so I ended up not using it at the con. I tried making a wider length of mail but with the gauge and size of the rings I'm using its really difficult to link them together. So I'm going to  start over with bigger, thinner rings. I've signed up for a photo shoot with Consplayers.com at AX. Hopefully I'll have all the tweaks and the chain mail done by then.

My "Project Time" is working out really well so far. I have drafted storyboards for the first two scenes in Surviving Together and started the third. There are a total of 4 scenes. I'm finding it quite difficult to storyboard. It's difficult to imagine characters in a setting, decide on camera angles, and have it all make sense. I'm also trying to reuse shots whenever possible to save time in the animation stage. Also I'm trying to avoid showing any characters walking because that's difficult to animate. I want to get this first episode done. Then I can work on more challenging animation shots. Right now I'm being as conservative as possible. Once I have the boards together I'll scan them all in and create an animatic to share with a few people to give me feedback. More updates to come.

I've spent some considerable time the past couple weeks reworking the tools the Moderators use at PaperDemon. We've been short staffed as of late and there have been a lot of submissions coming in. I figure if I can improve the tools to make it easier to mod and have it take less time, we can get more done with less staff. The tool uses a lot of nifty AJAX. I just learned XML and XSLT at a 1 day class at work and am trying to put it to good use. I have a php script that generates the XML file and an XSLT style sheet that states how the file should be formed. Then I use Sarissa to submit post data of my form, get the xml back from php, and then apply the style sheet to the data.

So far the only problem I've run into that I can't solve is that it doesn't work for some reason in IE 6. I haven't tried it on 7 yet. Sarissa has trouble applying the XSLT on the XML for some reason. It  doesn't make any sense because if I access the XML file directly and put in a line in there to use my XSLT file it outputs the formatted HTML correctly without any errors. Is this a problem with Sarissa? I tried searching the net but haven't found a solution yet. Works just fine in Firefox.