Elise

Elise is one of those characters that tries her best to defy one’s ability to cosplay. Her legs come from essentially nowhere, her clothes aren’t really clothes, all the places where skin is showing make it extremely hard to find a way to support the weight of the legs on the back… Really, Elise was a challenge because of physics. And gravity.

The clothes were simple enough. Some red vinyl pants with some stylized black chaps. A couple arm socks, also in vinyl. I chose vinyl because her look is very shiny, and I knew I could make the vinyl and the carapace mostly match in shine & texture.

For Elise’s carapace corset, I built the entire thing in craft form, first. It was a lot of layered panels that overlap to create that chitin look. Then I layered terraflex (a material very similar to worbla) overtop of it to make it durable and easy to paint.

The claws, gauntlets, shinguards, and shoulders were all done much the same way – started with foam, layered terraflex over them.

The spiderlegs were the most challenging. Sculpting them was easy enough. I chose to carve them out of stiff, purple insulation foam from the hardware store. I chose this because it was exceptionally lightweight, which I knew was going to be important because I didn’t have any really good spots to secure them to on my back.

In between each joint of the spider legs is a set of magnets, and strips of velcro, so that the leg segments can be dismantled for travel… but also so that if someone bumps into me (and in large costumes like this, they always do) the segment could just pop off without breaking the very fragile insulation foam.

Elise was definitely one of my most technically challenging costumes, and I’m so happy I did her. She’s such a creepy, sexy, alluring, and menacing character. And I just love that vibe. I love the expressions on people’s face when they see me walking through the convention hall.