Prepping for a convention

   If you live in my house, you have cosplayed at least once in your life. If you don't know what cosplay is, I wrote about it a few weeks ago, but basically you dress up in a character or genre just for the fun of it. Often at conventions. Comic Con is huge for this.

   Any way, in our house, prepping for a convention takes a lot of time and planning. For the last several years, we have attended Gen Con in Indianapolis. We don't live that far, so travel in minimal, and tickets for the four days are reasonable.

  While we only live just outside the city limits, we do rent a hotel at the convention center. If you've never been to Indy, just know that we host a lot of conventions. I swear to cheese there is one at least every other weekend. Gen Con is probably the biggest. This year its been expanded to take over Lucas Oil Stadium, the home field of the Indianapolis Colts.


   Tickets go on sale in January and so does the waiting list for the hotel. We could get a hotel outside of the waiting list, but then we wouldn't be eligible for the discount, and the hotel most likely wouldn't be connected to the convention center.

   This year my brother Ryan is joining us. He's huge Flash and Green Arrow fan. While I've had little time to investigate these shows, I am intrigued. Ryan wants to cosplay as the green arrow. I've been trying to make his a mask for ages, and I've been failing miserably. So this time, we are taking a very different approach. We are also taking a bit of time, as Gen Con isn't until August.

We started with a paper mache mold of his face.


Paper strips

   We tore several sections of an old newspaper into strips. If you do paper mache avoid the glossy ads of the newspaper, or magazine pages. In my experience they just don't work as well.

  Second, we dip the strip in the goo. The goo is just water and flour. Equal parts, I've heard of adding glue, but never tried it myself.

  I covered Ryan's face and majority of his scalp in cling wrap and began applying the saturated paper to the upper half of his face. I did a good four or five layers. It didn't take long as we weren't covering a large area. I made him lay there for a half hour. After pulling it off, I propped the mask up on a bowl. Its now dry, and one side has collapsed, but I wasn't going to use that part anyway.

Ryan and I will work on this and post the updates.


   So what do you cosplay as? If you haven't what would you do?

Thanks for reading.