starting with the reference photos...
this was the most popularly found picture but i also referenced from the anime, where she had purple hair instead of red in the photo.
a closer look at her armour and patterns
here's a famous version done that i thought was really nice. her wings worked better than mine obviously.
and here's her form without the armour
we also created the jar for the skit
and the blood soaked red version
created her god armour statue also, but omg we lost it!
i decided to make the pattern a different gold tone from the base armour, and the wings the iridescence kind.
for the patterns
for the base
it was kind of my first full armour, and i don't know why i picked something like this. all rina and her bright idea...
so of cos i started with the newspaper template, but i think i over measured and actually everything ended up oversized =.=
this was the first set of shoulder and skirt armour which i had to redo
so i trimmed it down by tearing out all the patterns i stuck and cutting the edge, then resticking all the patterns again. painful. and i did it about 2 weeks before the competition, wondering if i could ever complete on time. but then again, i started all these probably 1.5-2months ago, so actually i had plenty of time to complete. and i did complete very early.
the resized skirt armour
i stuck it together with the collar plates, and later tore it out again.
stuck it to the choker instead.
in my second round i added more accessories to the choker. this is seriously purely for better photoshoot effect later on hahaha
the skirt is also an early piece that i completed, which i redid and never used the second version =.= the 4th picture is the new version, but because it was made with pvc, any slight bend would cause damage, so for performance-wise it was better for me to use the cloth version even if it looked a bit more untidy.
here's my wonder woman/lady gaga boob/waist armour. haha. yep, it's a 3 piece suit.
the final touch to everything was actually the sequin lining and gems decor.
i also trimmed my arms armour because it was pretty hard to move around. this is the original size
then i cut it by about 2/5.
the armour needed to overlap a golden gloves. but i was colorblind and picked something too silver =.=
and of cos it didn't match well with the hand plates... duh
so another redoing with the correct cloth... i removed the plates from the silver gloves and stuck it on this. this gloves is now so tattered. haha.
helm also required some redoing because i was too dumb to not refer to my picture and stuck the patterns on the front wrongly =.= but yeah i got it right in the end. also the arch at the top was made out of foam and when i stuck the golden paper on it it kinda creased very terribly. i redid by putting a piece of cardboard on both sides and wrapping the golden paper on the cardboard instead.
the wings were made out of pvc. i cut out all the wing pieces, stuck the iridescent paper on them, then glued them on both sides of the water pipe.
had to tear them all out again because my pvc pipe chui-ed and i had to replace with a wooden stick instead. thank goodness my shifu was able to give me the suggestion. i also searched some youtube videos on how to make the wings 'flappable' and found an easy see-saw method to do it. in my second round, i added some tassel patterns so the 'mechanical' part didn't look so obvious.
to put on the wings you also need some kind of harness-like thing to stick in the wings, so i made this using wood and stuck the poles on it with lotss of glue and cloth tape. at least this makes taking out and putting on the wings MUCH easier.
my sceptre is made out of foam and wrapped with the golden paper. i had shek help me with the LEDs and they were all squeezed inside the hollow pipe, never to be taken out again... it really didn't work very well because when the connection is loose it was pretty hard to fix, and i had to connect 2 wires to get them to light up. so during the performance it lighted up only when i was lucky (which was 20% of the time). really risky.
my shield is actually very chui and nua. it's made out of about 8 foam pieces stuck together and trimmed around the edges to make it round
but with shin's brilliant idea of the wires sticking in corrugated sheet, he managed to help me turn the nua shield into something solid!
i also made the leg armour in my second round when i discovered that my skirt kept showing my legs. oh well. then somehow in my second round the leg just wasn't showing. blah.
i also made a simple dress that kinda look like her non-armoured version for the base. maybe i'll improve it so i can cos her normal version next time. but the skirt has gotta be much poofier...
and now the prop that we made for the performance. it consisted of the little prince... made out of jumping clay.
it really didn't show itself at all. seiya forgot to take it upstage the first round and it mysteriously disappeared when we entered the second round. TwT
and the last is the jar which took us an AWFULLY LONG time to complete after many trials and errors!!!!
first we did a wired base and filled it with papier marche. took the whole day to just tear the newspaper and mix it with flour and paste it over the netting.
in the second week we collected shredded paper from our offices (rina was really good at this, her mom picked up an entire trashbag of it) and redid the whole thing. yes we took out the previous week's effort and repasted them
to our dismay, it was a rainy week and the whole thing started to grow fungi and stank my whole house!!!!! had to throw the whole thing away...
we then tried things like separate pieces of pvc with magnetic hold ups... paper cut into pieces and just bursting through etc and after about 8-10 attempts, managed to come up with a simple yet effective idea...
it's black cloth over red plasticky paper (don't know what this is called) and this is over the white paper
the white paper was decorated with gold patterns
and when we set it up, we were able to change the color pretty well! but on stage, we didn't quite get the effect we want because i was pullng it a bit too fast and i think the audience didn't really catch what was happening. also on the second stage the lighting didn't really help accentuate the effect.
here's how it's supposed to work