Do you have any recommended tutorials on lighting? You have such a way of making your skies glow with sunlight and i admire it a lot.
honestly doing studies helped me a lot more than anything else!! i rly recommend that everyone does studies and continues to do studies bc it helps u improve !
I did a tutorial!!! My first tutorial ever!!!!! AAAAA
My artsy fellows have been asking me how I do it so I gathered I needed to make a tutorial. I chose our lovely princess as our guinea pig. Please bear with me this is the first time I do something like this 😭 hope you find it useful 🥰
If you like what I do don't forget to support me on Instagram! I'm also taking comissions 💜
Edit: in the first tip in the last picture I said multiply doesn't work above white. It does work, it appears as if it were in normal mode. My mistake! I got carried away writing. You get it? No? No?
how to light up your world!! (or maybe just your cosplay)
okay!! a handful of people have been asking me how i did the lighting for my ren cosplay, so i figured that i'd take a stab at trying to write up a tutorial. bear with me, because this is my first time trying to write one! aaannnd it was also my first time working with LEDs and wiring, so i might be explaining some stuff that's pretty common knowledge... but, basically, i'm trying to give you all the information that i wish had been available for me when i first started working on this stuff! and with that, heeeere we go!
first things first -- when it comes to lighting, there are a couple different materials that you can use, so! you need to figure out what kind of look you're going for, what kind of access you'll have to the lights once you install them, and what fits comfortably for your budget! one of the first things i considered were either using puck lights! pros? they're super bright, and all you'll have to do is install some batteries and stick them where you want them! no wiring needed! cons? it'd be preeeetty expensive to buy one of these for every single thing that i wanted to have light up, and with most designs, you either have to tap the light or flick a switch on each individual light to turn them on. since the design of my chestplate wouldn't really let me have access to the lights once they were in, these didn't work for me. so, i jumped to a similar option -- tea light LEDs! these offer the same ease of use as the puck lights, but they're cheaper, and i also found some that came with a remote so they could be turned on without me having to get at the lights themselves! problem... solved...? ... nope. turns out that the remote burned up the batteries craaazy fast, so the lights were dead within two days, even though i only turned them on for about 30 seconds total. so, basically, i'd be able to glow for less than a minute, then i'd have to buy another batch of batteries and rip apart my entire cosplay to reinstall them. no thanks!
this brought me to what i actually used... LED strips! (cue angelic chorus.) i bought mine from a seller off amazon (because i have prime, which is awesome!! and if you have an .edu email account, you can get a year of it for free!), and as you can see... they have a pretty wide selection of color choices, so you can get pretty much anything you're going for. hurray! they're also way cheaper than puck lights, and so far, they've held up to being turned on for... probably a total of about 72 hours! huzzah!
... unfortunately, they do require a bit of elbow grease, but that's why you have this tutorial!
anyway!
as you can see, the LED strips are going to come to you as one loooong, connected coil. if that's what you need, super! you can skip this step. unfortunately, i needed mine cut into smaller pieces, so that's what i did! fortunately! this actually isn't that tough to do -- you're going to have little copper markings that'll show you where to cut, so just snip right in the middle of those. just make sure that you cut as close to the middle as possible, leaving as much of that copper mark on each strip as you can.
why? because to connect the strips to each other, you're going to need to buy a cluster of these connectors, which'll link your LED strips to each other. now! how do they work?
there's a little tab up near the end of the connector -- get your fingernail underneath that and then pop it open, revealing two little silver prongs. you're going to slide your LED strip UNDER the two prongs, pushing it as far in as you can and making sure it sits snugly. now, a few notes about this! one is that the LED strips come with a rubber...ish... bubble thing over the top of the lights, which helps diffuse the glow of the light. UNfortunately, you have to either remove this bubble or punch the prongs straight through it to make sure that the silver prongs are sitting flush on top of the little copper markings at the end of your strips. you can either get your fingernail between the surface strip where the lights are sitting at the bubble and peel the whole thing off (which is what i did), or you can take a knife and CAREFULLY (!!!) cut only the end section of the bubble off so that it slides on and then leave the rest of it. if your lights are going to be exposed, i'd leave the bubble on because it makes the light look better, but mine weren't, so it wasn't an issue for me. (here's what mine looked like once i peeled the bubble off! and don't worry, it's the lights that are colored, not the rubber piece.) second note! this is pretty common sense, but be SUPER careful to make sure that you're matching up + and + and then - and -!! the ends of the strips AND the white tabs on the connectors both have + and - markings, so just make sure that you match them up on every single one. if you accidentally connect a + to a -, you're gonna short the circuit, and that's no good! finally, one of the trickiest parts about these connectors is making sure that the copper markings and the silver plugs are sitting snugly together -- if they're loose, your lights are going to flicker (and possibly go out) as you're moving around. if you want to make double sure that the prongs are sitting tight against the LED strip, you might want to take a pair of pliers and squeeze the prongs down against the LED strips!! i really, really, really can't overstate how important it is that they're snug, because it's a huge pain to have to go back and try to fix the problem once everything is attached to your costume. okay, now that everything is in, just snap the tab closed again! ta-da!
but, oh no! what if you need your LED strips to be farther apart than those puny connector cords can reach? never fear, friend! with a bit more elbow grease, we can totally take care of that, too!
first, pop over to your nearest home improvement store and pick up a coil of black wire and a coil of red wire, like so! as you can see, i used 16 gauge, which was a bigger gauge than the wire of my connector, but that's okay! better a bit bigger than a bit smaller, but you want to generally be pretty close to the size of the wires in the connector. oh, and remember! the bigger the gauge, the smaller the wire. (so 2 is bigger than 8!)
okay! cut your connector wire right down the middle, then cut as much of the red and black wire as you're going to need to reach all the way from strip to strip. again, better to have a little more than a little less, because if it's really tight and pulling, you might accidentally yank the strip out of the connector, and that's no good. once you've got the wires cut how you want them, take a wire stripper, clamp it on the wire, and use it to peel off the coating stuff so that you expose the actual wires underneath. once you've done that, pinch the wires together and then put a wire cap down over the whole bundle, then twist it as tightly as it'll go so that it'll connect the wires together. ta daaaaa! again, kind of a duh, but make sure that you're putting the red wire with the red wire and the black wire with the black wire.
as another note! wire caps are pretty secure, but if you have the tools and the know-how, i'd definitely suggest soldering the wires together. that's going to give you the most secure connection! just make sure that you're using SOMETHING to cover up the exposed wires -- if the exposed red wires touch the exposed black wires, you'll have a short.
noooow you might be wondering how you're going to power up this bad boy? i found a battery holder, then wired the lights to it. you're going to take one of your connector halves, and connect the wires to each other the same way that you did when you were extending the wires. red to red, black to black, and ka-bam. clip an LED strip in your connector, and you're in business. and even though i'm putting this part at the end, it's REALLY helpful to do this first so that you can keep turning the lights on and make sure all of them are lit up -- it sucks big time to attach everything, turn it on, and then realize that one section is killing everything.
okay, so you've got your LED strips, but how do you make the globe part of the light? what i did was find some fillable christmas ornaments in the sizes that i needed, then i took spray paint that was intended for stained glass and colored them the yellow that i needed. the more opaque you go with the color, the dimmer your light will be, but it'll also diffuse the light more evenly across the surface of the globe and hide the strips underneath a little better.
just for your reference, here's a few pictures of what my cosplay looks like underneath! i secured everything with gorilla tape, which is hella strong and better than duct tape for this purpose. you can also use things like super glue, i just wanted a semi-permanent solution so that i could go back and pull the wires back up if i needed to fix them.
hopefully this was enough information to help you out!! if you have any questions or comments, feel free to shoot them to me over at my cosplay tumblr or facebook page!
