Sub-Zero Elsa Progress Tutorial: Armor

 

 

 

Sub-Zero Elsa CosplayTutorial: The Armor

 

The Sub-Zero Elsa cosplay I did for GenCon was a lot of fun because I designed the costume which gave me some creative freedom.  I still may make some tweaks to it yet, but it came together quite nicely.

The mask and the wig were the most important parts of this cosplay because they are the most iconic.  I do have a tutorial on how I made my mask here. 

Sadly, I do not have a tutorial on the wig.  But I used Tauriel from Arda Wigs in titanium blonde.  However, I would recommend Suzi in the same color for an Elsa cosplay as it's already layered.  They were just out of stock when I bought mine. Tauriel is the same style, just not layered. 

And here's a video on styling the wig for Elsa's hair
On my wig, I used a fishtail braid and I made the top wisps more spikey because I thought it looked better with this mashup version of Elsa.

 

 

 

 

 

And now on to the armor!!

 

 

 

The armor I made for this was actually pretty simple.  Here I'll discuss the shoulder pads, ice gloves, belt emblem, and boot covers.


Belt emblem

For this I had a resin ring.  This was one that I had made for the tassels on my Princess Hilda cosplay, but didn't use.  But any type of ring shaped thing would work for this.  I cut out a piece of acrylic and glued it to the top.  Again, you could really use anything here.  Cardboard probably would have been fine.  Then I painted the whole thing blue.
I cut the Lin Kuei symbol out of craft foam and painted the pieces black.  Then I took those pieces and arranged them on the circle and glued them in place.

At this point, I had run out of hot glue so I actually ended up gluing them down with fabric glue.  Doing this, I learned something very useful.  The time of fabric glue I used dried with a clear watery look.  Perrrrrfect.  I shall use this to look like ice!  I painted everything a darker blue and covered with the fabric glue and let it dry.

 

After this, I added some shading and highlights and touched up a few places with fabric glue.  The speckled on some pure white paint with a sponge brush to give it a frosty look.

Shoulder pads

The shoulder pads are very simple shapes.  They are ribbed and painted to give them a frozen look.  I made these out of craft foam.  If you don't know, craft foam is invaluable to cosplayers.  It's inexpensive, lightweight, and flexible.  If you heat it up you can form it into shape and once it cools, it will maintain that shape.
The shoulder pads were very simple shapes and just curved around to fit my shoulder.  They took like 2 seconds to form, but we will come back to that.

So to start I cut out 2 pieces for each shoulder.  I marked where I wanted the ribbed indentations to be and then I sewed them together.  Yes, sewed...on my sewing machine.  This was partially because I ran out of hot glue and partially to see if it would work...it was probably completely unnecessary, but it did have kind of a cool effect.  I stitched around the edge and then along the lines I marked for the indentations.

After they were stitched together, I made my indentations.  I did this with an old soldering iron.  I just ran the soldering iron along the lines I made, melting the craft foam and creating indentations.

I painted them blue and airbrushed in some shading and highlights.  Then I took my fabric glue and spread it over the shoulder pads giving it an icy look and sponged on some white around the edges.

After all that, I used my heat gun and shaped them to fit my shoulder.  The shoulder pads attach to the tunic with Velcro.


Ice gloves

For the ice gloves I bought some really cheap arm warmers.  They're like long gloves without fingers.  And I got an aqua bluish duct tape and wrapped my arms in it.  I tried to make wrinkles here and there.  The idea was to make a jagged ice look.  I also took smaller pieces and wrinkled and folded them to add some jagged edges around the top and bottom of the gloves.

 

 

After this, I cut them off by cutting a zig zag line on the under side of my arm.  I trimmed up some of the jagged edges and added a few more.  Then sealed them with a few coats of spray on mod podge.  Then I airbrushed in some shadows.

 

 

And then some highlights

 

 

 

Then I sealed them again with the mod podge spray.  The mod podge spray I have is a pearlescent sealer.  So it gave them I nice shimmery look when they were sealed.



Boot covers

I didn't really get many progress photos of these, but the process was very simple.  I have these fierce boots that I came across at Goodwill a couple years ago.  I never wear them. Ever.

I found fabric that matched the suede on these boots perfectly.  I started out by taking some scrap felt fabric I had lying around and pinned it around my leg.  Marking where the back seam would be and drawing the shape of the top and bottom with a paint marker.  I cut this out.  Stitched it together and tried it on to make sure it would fit.  I didn't need to use stretchy fabric or a zipper. 
Then I did the same thing with the black suede fabric I got for the covers.  Pinning and stitching until they fit just right.

Then I cut strips of the fabric I made the tunic out of and folded them and ironed them to make a trim for the boots.  I fabric glued the trim on and BAM!  Boot covers

And just because I know some people are thinking it or wondering.  Yes...these shoes were wicked uncomfortable.  I mean...the devil..  Just the worst.  I'm not very good at heels to begin with, so these were not the best choice.  But look at them!  They're just such good looking boots!

I will most likely be purchasing different footwear sadly, or investing in some very nice insoles.  Hopefully the insoles...because I love these boots :)


So that was the process in making all that stuff.  Hope it was useful or at least interesting! ;)