Its time for our Fourth Costoberfest Spotlight! This year in honor of the Cosplay Cover Variants, we’ll be talking to the cosplayers featured on the variants and their costume-making process!

Next up is a Kit Quinn, who is on the The Uncanny Avengers #1 Cosplay Cover Variant, on sale now!

Originally from the Bay Area but living in LA now, Kit grew up as a theater kid, which has made living in LA super fun. She started cosplaying in 2007 when a group of friends got together to make group costumes, including a large Alice in Wonderland group!

We asked Kit to walk us through making of Wasp!

—

Wasp is a character I’ve wanted to build for a while, I just wasn’t sure I could pull it off. She has quite a few different looks and each one has its own challenges, both in construction and in the actual wearing of the costume. It wasn’t until Steven got a few chrome based projects under his belt that I thought we could pull of her armored look. The body suit was a relatively easy build for me. I added a few of my own pattern details on the back and on the arms to mirror some creative sewing I had to do on Steven’s costume; I was short on fabric, and I really like the results. To keep the stream lined look of her costume I hand sewed water shoes into the feet of the body suit. The gloves were made with Velcro to easily slip on and off so I can do things like eat and use my phone.

Now on to the armor! To make the armor we first had to do a body cast of me.  I was wrapped in plastic wrap and plaster bandages to make the cast which Steven then laid fiberglass into, to create my double.  I was able to use this torso to sculpt the ab plates, but due to a mess up on my part the chest plate had to be sculpted on a body cast I had previously made of myself.  Once the two torsos were ready to be worked on I placed masking tape on them and drew out my basic shapes.  I then transferred this pattern to paper versions to use to cut the shapes out of Monster Clay that I had rolled out into about a ¼" thick sheet.  These cut out pieces of clay were then put back onto my torso where I adding raised details, checked for symmetry, and made sure the angles flowed between the plates.  Once I had the shapes where I wanted Steven came in with his more exacting eye and did the final polishing and altering of the shapes.

The next step is to clear coat the clay, and then mold.  I made mold walls out of more clay and brushed on about 4 layers of silicone. I then made a mother mold out of liquid plaster.  Normally liquid plaster isn’t a great idea for mother molds because it can get heavy and will crack pretty easily, but this mold doesn’t need to last very long, so saving money seemed like a good idea! Once we had the mold I did a junk casting to make sure my mold didn¹t have any flaws and that everything fit.  Steven then did the real casting in Onyx resin backed with Free Form Air.  We wanted the plates to be nice and light to start since we were about to cover all of them in metal.  Once we had the final casting in hand it was time to prime and wet sand to a glossy smooth finish, then off to the chromer!

This is where we made a mistake in our planning.  Our chrome guy said we could pre-embed the magnets into the plates and he could basically chrome around hem using this special chrome resistant tape. Unfortunately the chrome still got to some of the magnets and ate away at their strength so Steven had to drill them out and embed new magnets.  A valuable lesson was learned there! Once all the magnets were secured into the plates it was a fun game of taping the armor to me to figure out where the other half of the magnets needed to go in the body suit to secure the armor in place.  I had acquired some magnets that come in a handy plastic square for just such a purpose as this.  I feel a bit like Iron Man every time I get into this costume, with plates flying in and clicking into place.

All together this costume took about two weeks to construct, and was a pretty fun and simple build.  The funniest moment being when all our friends wanted to go watch The Avengers, but we still needed to work, so we took my smaller chest cast with us to the movie theater to sculpt in the car!  

—

As Kit grew up wanting to be a princess, which may not be an actual viable career choice, its through cosplay that she can always dress up as any character she wants and be that person, at least in spirit, for a couple days out of the year at conventions

For more from Kit Quinn, click over to her Facebook Page. and for even more from Costoberfest, swing over to Marvel.com/Costoberfest

Stay tuned to Marvel’s Tumblr as we continue highlighting more cosplayers from our Cover Variants each week!

Photographs by Judy Stephens and Kitt Quinn.

654

12