Welcome to my Ballroom! I'm Kat (She/They), and this is my sideblog dedicated to cosplaying. It's mostly Bendy related, but in the future I hope to cover more fandoms. Hope you enjoy your time here.
Greetings everyone, and a warm welcome to my ballroom! I'm Kat (She/They), the Phantom Cherub, and this is my cosplay side blog. I've been cosplaying since 2019, though I wasn't really public about it until 2021, when Lauren Synger hosted her Dance with the Angel event. Now, I cosplay for fun at conventions and in videos here online. If you'd like to find me in other places, it's the same username on both Instagram and YouTube.
Looking forward to sharing some cosplay goodness with you guys! If you ever have questions about crafting for cosplay, process, etc, my askbox is always open. Would love to chat about the craft!
Most of the characters I cosplay are from the Bendy series (Bendy and the Ink Machine, the books, my takes on human designs, etc), but in the future I hope to include more fandoms within my line-up.
"One last thing. I may have told you a teeny, tiny, itsy-bitsy lie. Sorry about that."
That's right, there are MORE photos to share! 🎉
Delighted to get some shots with the definitely Very Real Not-a-Replica Master Crown haha, if anyone tries to tell you otherwise they're just jealous of my cursed ancient artifact 😤
"Truth be told, I want to hear the screams of every living being in the universe..."
"Screams of JOY, that is, as they visit my very own amusement park! It'd have all kinds of surprises!"
Finally getting around to posting my Magolor cosplay from my photo shoot from Anime Los Angeles allllll the way back in January! Wow, time flies!
It was a DELIGHT getting to work with Ray to bring this shoot to life, they really helped bring forth the whimsy with their coaching and editing skills! 💪😤👌🎉
Gosh, guys you don't even know what kind of fun I just had this weekend. I got in my annual convention visit, and my faith in humanity is very high. My heart is very full. I debuted a new cosplay and so many people loved it, and I can't WAIT to show you what it looks like. 💜
how'd you make the poor edward cosplay? :0 i was planning to make a costume of him and i'm curious how you made yours!!
Oh! I've been meaning to post some progress shots of the mask from my Poor Edward cosplay, lemme grab those! Short version: I followed this guy's technique.
Long version and some bonus photos under the cut!
It's a combo of plaster strips for the base, and then paper clay for the actual sculpting. (If you google "plaster strips for art" then fifty different versions of this will come up, they're called different things but it's essentially a roll of gauze-looking material that you can cut into strips, dip into water and use like paper mache, and then it dries very strong).
I put vaseline all over my face and got Boo to help me put the plaster strips over just the top half, like, just above the mouth. This part doesn't have to look good -- this is just to make sure the base is strong and it's like, molded to your face and sits there comfortably.
The eye zone is real big b/c Boo was trying to leave me as much room as possible to sculpt them as I liked. I decided not to include the mouth in this step because the mouth of his mask doesn't follow his face at all. It's the big reason he looks so uncanny (and part of why Edward is difficult to draw): the proportions of the mouth are wrong for his face and thus sort of stretch it. So I just marked paper to measure where my actual mouth sits and built a foil base to put the rest of the plaster on.
I struggled a lot with this step because of the actual shape of my face -- I have a significant enough overbite that my face juts out the furthest at my teeth, then has a weaker chin that slopes in a lot. To be clear, this is an attractive feature I like about myself, but it did make it hard to figure out the balance between "mask sticks out from my face enough to look wrong" and "mask slopes back weirdly because it's matching my face," and I was working on a deadline to try to get this done for the cosplay contest so I JUST DID MY BEST LMAO. I think if I ever redid this mask I'd try to make it slope back less and see how that looks.
Anyway the next step is PAPERCLAY!!! The reason I went with this material is that the guy in that tutorial video talked about how it will stick to itself, so you can do a little bit of work, let that dry, and come back later to add more clay to that section without suffering, which seemed like a good feature for someone who hasn't sculpted in a WHILE and would probably need to do that
The biggest downside of this stuff that I ran into is that it does develop little cracks as it dries. So you kinda need to give yourself enough time to let it dry fully, then go fill in cracks, then let it dry fully, before you start sanding or painting or whatever.
ANYWAY: SCULPTING
One thing I quickly learned is that it's impossible that Poor Edward's nose fits in the nose of his mask as illustrated. That thing needs to be bigger!! Anyway there's some creative license and a few things that don't quite match, but I'm pretty pleased with how close I got it!!!
the finished product (unpainted):
I did a little sanding after this, but honestly, probably not as much as I should've lmao. THE DEADLINE WAS APPROACHING and I don't think the extension had been announced yet so I was sweatin'. Time to paint!!
The strat of "paint the whole thing red, then put really exaggerated black in every crevice, then slowly build up more layers of dark red to push back those shadows" worked really well for me to get the Spooky Look.
At this point Boo drilled a hole through the sides of the mask so we could thread a ribbon through to tie it on. You don't see the tie at all when I'm wearing it... but I still wanted black to match the art of the smiling mask, and we found this velvet looking ribbon that felt perfect haha. It's just hot glued on the inside. The mask is not Super heavy, but it's heavy enough that it does not sit properly unless it's tied on pretty tightly, so I had to tie it under the wig (alas). However the mask itself is genuinely not uncomfortable, I'm confident I could just wear it all day and be fine. Also, if you're curious, it's a little awkward but I can drink a glass of water through the mask. I fully believe that with years of practice he can just do this as if it's normal.
have a triumphant bathroom photo I took after finally getting the blue contacts to stay in my eyes LMAO
The cravat I draw Poor Edward with is a mail coach knot, if you look this up you will find several guides on how to tie it and iTS REALLY EASY ACTUALLY we should bring back cravats. The wig was just..... a lot of suffering and crying and hairspray and getting Boo's help to sew in wefts, and I'll be honest IM STILL NOT HAPPY WITH IT. I have plans to get a different wig that has more of a part built in to see if that looks better, but haven't gotten around to fussing with edits to this cosplay yet.
But no matter how long it takes me to come back and fiddle with it, the bonus of all this nonsense is: I now have an actual Poor Edward mask that just lives in my room, bringing me joy every time I see it.
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P.S.: I don't think I posted this before? My favourite Edward photo from our shoot actually wasn't even a planned one; I was waiting for Boo to get out of costume (his master costume was SURPRISINGLY INVOLVED) and Thren surreptitiously snapped a photo:
genuine fuzzy feelings for the beloved (me waiting for my real life partner to join me for more cosplay shenanigans)
What if I told you I wore Mr Eaten (warm weather edition) to a local renaissance festival and he had a great time
I think I want to further work on this cosplay and add gory gloves… his lower jaw does move a little bit but I think there’s ways to make the movement more pronounced.
Also my bag does have a well and seven candles on it.
Favorite games/movies/shows: Bendy, Cuphead, Undertale, Frozen, The Little Mermaid, Lisa Frankenstein, Tangled, The Princess and The Frog, Cinderella, Detroit Become Human, Life is Strange, DDLC, Arcane, Star Wars, WandaVision, and more!
Favorite artists: Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, Sabrina Carpenter, and Chappell Roan!
Hello and welcome back to another Show and Tell Saturday! Show off a finished craft, a work in progress, or a completed trade - what's new in your world this week?
Hey fellow crafters, hope you've been having a great week! I'm here to share a little joy. I've been working over the course of a couple months now to make beaded bracelets. And it's been such a good time! These are my bracelets from this week specifically. I'm gonna be cosplaying as Gangle (The Amazing Digital Circus), Alice Angel (Bendy and the Ink Machine), and Shadow (Sonic the Hedgehog) at a convention this month, and I wanted to have some bracelets to share with the people I meet! Most of them are themed to the series I'm cosplaying for, but there are some outliers. (I was very close to cosplaying Meta Knight, so there's some Kirby in there from before I switched over to Shadow.)
Boris here is gonna help me out. The plan is to have people reach into him to pull out a bracelet on the day I wear Alice. If I have to carry him around all day for the craftsmanship judging and the big cosplay masquerade performance, I may as well have fun with him in a way that's fitting to my character, right? X'''D
There were two really cool cosplayers that shared bracelets with me last year, and it made my day so much that I want to share that joy with someone else. I still wear both of those bracelets often. It's a fun way to celebrate my fandoms while also doing something creative. I'm especially excited about some of these beads. The Bendy themed bracelets use a bead that both glows in the dark and changes color under UV light. So at first glance, it looks like a plain black and white bracelet, but in reality, it's got some secrets waiting to be found, just like the trek through the studio. For my Sonic bracelets, I've started adding in some glow in the dark stars to them, which is just plain fun. I'll admit, I may have made a Kirby bracelet for me using them too, and it feels really cute to wear.
My thanks once more to all of you for your efforts in this competition. We don’t take it lightly that many of you spent hours on costumes and setups to make these entries; it’s a beautiful thing, and we’ve heartily enjoyed seeing them all. Please join me in congratulating the winners, all of whom received a Rubbery Plongeur companion:
Most Masterly
Giandark as Mr Eaten, the runt, cast into the snow. Though he seems to be making the most of it.
The Heart of Your Character
hesperidia as her character, Emily Yu. We loved the attention to detail, and the connection of her backstory to the cameo portrait’s accessories!
A Specific Individual
Thren as Lilac. The details here are also exquisite, down to the jewellery and hair colour.
Made Us Laugh Most
There were two entries which we simply couldn’t choose between, so we have two winners in this category:
Savato as the Jovial Contrarian, because of course.
Elisabeth Snowe entering her friend as a maximized scandal increase outfit: for the commitment, and because I don’t think we’d ever pictured anyone wearing that one in the real world.
Peak Neath
Violet Hayes/malicious fox as Mr Cards absolutely nailed this one. The ambiance is perfectly threatening.
Bonus Category: Best Group Costume
We didn’t know how many people would team up with friends for the competition, and in the end we had enough people enter in groups that we thought it fitting to give them a category of their own.
Congratulations to tumblr users coffeethathurtsyou and shazzbaa as Mr Fires and Poor Edward!
Congrats to everyone, these are fantastic! I had a great time scrolling through the cosplay comp channel looking at all the entries, I can only imagine the difficulty in choosing winners. Thank you FBG for the fun contest!
And THANK YOU ALL for your kind words and messages about my Mr Eaten cosplay ❤️ It was a ton of fun to make!
