Sometimes, my cosplays go horribly wrong. What follows is one such piece, and my word I was disappointed that disaster struck. You see, I was planning on possibly attending one of the London Super Comic Cons, and Kevin Eastman happened to be there. Those who have been paying attention may be aware that I love the current IDW run of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics, and that I absolutely adore Alopex as a character. With Alopex being the first new character that Mr Eastman had created in a long time, I thought that she would be an ideal cosplay!
Being in an experimental mood, I figured that I would try something new and try to make the mask using resin rather than foam. And so began the trouble …
First, I built the mask base out of clay, then I used that to make a mould. Some scrappy slush casting later and I had the mask ready to trim. A bit more work later and we get to the shots below …
Monstrous, isn’t it? I’ve added the larger shot on the right so that you can see where things were starting to go wrong. If you look closely, the mouth is leaning to the side. The reason for this is that the upper jaw on the left side came out thinner than the rest due to my inconsistent resin work. Long story short, it started to bend under the weight of the metal strut. I bent it back into shape and hoped that it would hold, then moved on to the tail and furring stage …
So far, so good. The massive tail is done, and the mask is holding just fine, so I start planning my way around her general body. And then the jaw fell apart. The left side snapped, and the best that I could do was to rebuild part of it with clay. But it snapped again. Which left me in the position where I could start over entirely or simply move on. Having decided not to do the con then anyway, I moved on. I still have both the tail and broken mask in my loft though.
So there you have it. A cosplay that never was. But that’s OK. It’s cool to make mistakes, because that’s how you learn. I hope you enjoyed my failings 🙂
Matt Doyle Media 
Shame it didn’t work out. It would have looked really cool.
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Thank you. If I’m being honest, I think that I would have struggled with how to build the body too, so it may have been doomed from the get go. It really is a shame though. She was the first new TMNT charter that Kevin Eastman had made in years, and I was originally going to wear her to meet him (though tickets for that feel through too).
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Did this cosplay experience factor into your decision to do Inukai with latex foam?
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Oddly, no. It did confirm that my slush casting and clay sculpting needs work, but it is something that I’d like to try again simply because the snap on the jaw is easier to achieve with resin than my usual foam.
With Inukai it was really more that her muzzle is relatively short. I was going to attempt it with foam but my partner suggested the latex approach to make it more like Cats (or Lucky Animals when Devin Townsend plays it live on the Retnal Circus DVD if you prefer). Initially, that was going to be done manually with padding under the latex, but then I saw the pre-built ready-to-paint mouth pieces as figured it would be a good, inexpensive time saver.
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