Darkforestdreams - A Wannabe Creator

My first ever comic con! And first cosplay too. Of course it's gonna be my boy :] Ramblings about the process are under the cut(Let me know if?? You would want me to elaborate with process images for any of the steps?)

The costume took me forever to make, as I've never done any machine sewing, sculpting, fabric dying or spray painting before but learning all of these was so fucking fun!! I never realised just how many different skills go into making a cosplay but it was so worth it!!!

Almost all of the clothes(except the hat) were purchased first as bases, but all of the detailing was added by me. All of the fabric used was originally just scraps that I was given for free so I needed to learn how to dye and dye all of the stars, they were originally white.

The sewing machine was its own beast that brought me tons of frustration from the lack of skill and knowledge (it was devastating to find out that 95% of fuck ups were my fault and not the machine's lmao). But as a result, a hat sewn from scratch, all of the fur trims, embroidery on the corset, stars and the collar(which is very hard to see on the pictures unfortunately) was all added manually. The stars and the stripes(on the back of the cape) were attached using heat-and-bond adhesive (I WISH I knew about such thing just when I started working on this. It would save me so much time and nerves.)

Then I found out about polymorph(mouldable plastic) and it has become the next thing I wanted to learn, to sculpt the claws and the fangs(yes, they're handmade jfksjs). The claws I then primed and painted in trillion coats because I wasn't satisfied with the colour of the spray paint. The fangs I moulded to my own teeth and then stained with tea to match the colour of my teeth :)c

As for makeup, I used Mehron Paradise water activated paints. At first I wanted to try to save money and bought myself Snazaroo instead, which unfortunately turned out to be a waste. Snazaroo didn't hold on my face for longer than 2 hours, cracking and peeling awfully. Mehron on the other hand survived 11 hours of me smiling, talking, emoting and such and didn't even crease at the smile lines(I'm actually shocked about that). It obviously works like any other makeup which means your skin texture and wrinkles won't go anywhere but Mehron's elasticity pleasantly surprised me. It did obviously smear from sweat and saliva(if you're eating and licking your lips) but if you don't touch the skin it just dries again, self setting. But if it's dry it's fully smear-proof. Highly recommend!

And last but not least, I've decided against painting my hands as it was very risky that I will stain everything I touch at the smallest hint of sweat. So instead I got myself gloves-tights(? Not sure how they're called but it's made from the same fabric as tights) and painted them with normal acrylic paint(did you know you could dye fabric with acrylic paint? I personally didn't), then heat set with an iron and voilà, they're reusable, my hands are not stained after an exhausting day and I don't stain everything I touch. It worked wonderfully which honestly was a surprise as I was really sceptical that acrylic paint will somehow stay in place.

I think this whole thing took me minimum of 6 months with big-big breaks for my school and life in general. But I'm really proud! This project taught me so many new skills and I couldn't have been happier about learning new knowledge, even if it sucked to fail in the meantime.

Everyone at the con was really nice and gave me a large confidence boost even tho it was my first time and I had no idea what I was doing. Taking photos with other people was really awkward/new for me as I hate cameras so I really had no idea how to pose/behave in front of one. But that's okay I think. This whole experience definitely made me want to do this again, so I think that will come with experience. Thank you for reading this far, hope you enjoyed this little summary :)

The pencils breaking into smaller pencils

And why they treating word pencil like a slur. Reblog to scare ai losers away 🤭

Would anyone still be interested in my Sun-centered sams fic.. or should I just drop it entirely..?

Catnap just acts like a real cat

I've been wanting to be an online writer, voice actor, and more for OVER TEN YEARS. The reason I couldn't even get anything of worth online is because I had to spend over half of that time just trying to survive life (especially school) and just figuring out how to keep going while dealing with chronic anxiety that's become so normalized for me that I can't always detect it.

The rest of those years was trying to survive a new lifestyle a family member FORCED onto us because of a selfish decision. And for two and a half years I've been stuck in this new life where EVERYTHING I HAVE IN ME goes into trying to find a balance between taking care of myself and taking care of others.

And now, when I'm finally starting to feel ready? THIS SHIT HAPPENS!

#i fuckin hate ai. every day that passes i hate ai and what its doing to our society even more.

it literally makes me so sad.... like i love drawing and sharing my art but I feel like now there aren't any sites that you can even do that anymore because they all keep making deals like this with AI companies. And who knows how much good "opting out" is even gonna do. Sorry to come rant in your ask box this news just really upset me is all...

No worries! It upset me too...

I already made all my fics on AO3 only accessible to logged in users like over a year ago after there were rumors that they were web scraping AO3 to train AIs. Now I'm having to go through each side blog I have individually and enable the "don't fucking steal my shit" button.

And everyone rn is going coo-coo bananas over AI, talking about how it's going to revolutionize everything and make it better but not to sound like a boomer but things have gone too fucking far! Sometimes progress for the sake of progress is bad actually. No one wants to talk about what we're losing for the sake of progress. We're literally losing art, the one thing that has been so innately human from the very beginning of our species. We're losing art to machines that can only take what we as humans have created, chew it up, and then regurgitate it back to us.

Yes, I recognize the merits of AI, but in my humble opinion, the losses far outweigh the benefits.

Not to mention the only way these AIs are being trained in the first place is by stealing the posts and artwork of real humans, the vast majority of which have not consented to their work being used in this way.

I'm so tired. I hate AI. I didn't a couple years ago. But with each passing day and each new thing that happens with it I grow more disillusioned by it and quite frankly fearful of it.