Amphibia Costumes: Anne in Calamity Form and Darcy - Blue Sky Plans
Alright, with the
Disneyland trip recap finished, it's time to move onto the next project. G had an incredible time dressing up as Mike and Marty Wazowski during the Not So Scary Halloween Party in October 2023. So it didn't take long for her to come up with some new ideas for what she'd like to do next. She continues to push the envelope with what we've been capable of in our cosplay adventure. We've learned how to work with simple LEDs with single CR2032 batteries with Scarlet Witch, we improved our foam skills with Ms Marvel and Shang-Chi, we increased our brightness with the 352/m LED and learned sound effects and learned how to sew with the Monsters Inc costumes. So I bit my lip as I asked her what she has in mind for our next adventure.
Cleaning the space
Before we can get started with the Amphibia Costumes, it was time to clean up the basement from the previous projects. I've also been spending a lot of time on G's Escape Room 10th birthday party. So with those things wrapped up, this was a good time to clean the space, reorganize, and get things ready for the next adventure.
The family got me a sewing table for Christmas. I paired it with G's completely impractical kid's ping pong table.
We finally remembered why the large old table wouldn't disassemble to add in more leafs. Turns out we put some screws in that secured in for the move back in 2018. We put the plush carpet along the long edges for nice places to stand.
Lastly was the addition of a hobby hood that can vent outside. The ruler is 18 inches for reference. This will be useful for soldering and even more so for the new airbrush paint system that G got for Christmas.
Anne in Calamity Form
So this is Anne. In Amphibia, she's been sucked through a portal into the land of amphibians. At the very end of the series, she goes into her final form, Calamity, in order to save her friends. So this is what G would like to recreate. Let's go into the blue sky ideas that we're going to try to bring this cartoon character to life.
-Bright blue glowing hair.
-All of the blue accents within the armor should glow.
-The cape should glow blue.
-Armor is made of foam but is painted to look like real metal.
-Sew the entire dress ourselves.
-Giant blue tennis racket that fully glows, including the strings.
-The costume needs to look as amazing during the day as much as at night.
I think it's pretty clear where her mind is at. We loved the Wazowski costumes, but they were A+ costumes at day and D costumes at night. There just wasn't as much flash. So she wants to create a costume that looks like real gold armor during the day, but when it comes nighttime she glows bright blue just like Anne in her Calamity form. For my DragonBall fans, think Super Saiyan Goku.
For the hair, we're going to use the same 352/m LEDs. The drawback is that it requires a large 8 AA battery to run. So we found some waistbands meant for passports that can hold the battery packs around her waist. Still undecided on how to make the leaves and sticks glow colors other than blue. But we'll cross that bridge once we get into it.
The giant tennis racket will be an interesting build. The piece will be made out of plastazote (transparent foam), need to find something to make it more rigid than Maui's hook, and light it up with a programmable LED strip. Possibly add in some light effects instead of static blue. The strings will be made from EL Wire (like we used for Shang-Chi rings).
We did some playing around with preliminary cape design. But everything we came up with wasn't bright enough. So we had to choose. It could be bright and rigid, or less bright and flowy. She wants bright, so we get rigid with it.
The gloves will be built with a new to us product called Noods. They're like a cross between the EL wire and single LEDs.
The armor is going to be made out of regular EVA foam. We spent a lot of time researching options on how to make EVA foam look like metal. It came down to we probably needed to move away from acrylics with a paintbrush and instead work with airbrushing. We found a product recommended by Kamui Cosplay that simulates metal and doesn't crack/distort when flexed. We're going to do some test painting with it to find the look we're going for.
Lastly, G wants us to make the whole dress from scratch. I haven't done much with this quite yet, but I'm confident we'll come up with a plan.
Darcy
This is Darcy. She's one of Anne's best friends. But her mind has been taken over by the Hive and she's become a villain. This is who G wants me to be. So let's see what G wants us to accomplish with this costume.
-#1 on the list is placing three LED screens in the helmet to make uncanny moving eyeballs.
-The horns should be big, bold, and beautiful.
-The armor should look like metal and be purple.
-Maybe some underglow along the armor edges to give it an extra look.
-Flame dagger with actual flame flicker made with programmable LEDs made of foam.
By far the biggest undertaking is trying to use the uncanny eyes program on Arduino. The hardest part will be that the options they already have for eyes aren't quite what G wants. So once we figure out how to run the program, then we need to figure out how to edit the images to match the cartoon Darcy helmet eyes.
We'll use the same airbrush kit for the armor. The same Noods but unlike Anne which will be on the outside of the costume, these Noods will be used as underglow and hidden underneath the costume. The cape for Darcy doesn't glow.
The flame dagger is small, but she wants it to look like a real flame at the end of the dagger.
So new things for us this time around:
-Programmable LEDs
-Airbrush Paint
-Programming uncanny LED eyes
-Glowing hair
-Sewing an entire dress
It's an ambitious project, but G's an ambitious kid. So wish us luck!
Next post
-Anne's Hair - Part 1
Even with a nap he probably won’t stay up later than 10:30, but as long as he makes it to the parade and fireworks I’ll call it a win.
