It all started with an ax and a mace:
My boyfriend and I were wandering around a local markdown store, when I came across a plastic battle ax amongst the Halloween props and costumes. "Hey!" says I, "they have a battle ax like [your Warcraft character] Pugool's!" Says he, "Yeah, and they have a one-handed mace over there like [your Warcraft character] Agriveda's!"
We looked at each other and in a moment of synchronicity exclaimed:
"WE SHOULD BE OUR WARCRAFT CHARACTERS FOR HALLOWEEN!!!!"Those fateful words began the month of sweat, tears, screaming and hot glue burns that was the making of our World of Warcraft costumes. This was a labor of love from both me and my boyfriend, and I am super proud of our hard work. First, the goodies:
Meet Agriveda the lvl 77 troll shaman and Pugool the lvl 80 orc warrior:
/cast Healing Wave
/flex
A model of my character in her gear, circa level 75
For the Horde!
"Lok'tar!!"
A model of his character in his gear
The making-of was a long and arduous thing. For reference I used some screen caps and downloaded the very helpful WoW model viewer here:
http://www.wowmodelviewer.org/Most of Pugool's armor was made using the tutorial from Jia Jem with some minor revisions made for the sake of time and money. We did only one layer of paper mache and skipped the paper clay layer all together. I love Jia Jem and her work, and her tutorials are the best:
http://www.jiajem.com/armor.html
The card board shapes for Pugool's legs and arms.
Pugool's shoulders and some other pieces in the paper mache stage. The white piece in the middle is his chest plate with one coat of gesso on it.
One of my shoulder pieces halfway through the painting process. Base layers of metallic spray paint, then acrylic were put down. The photo shows the left side before antiquing and the right side after antiquing. Antiquing in this case was just painting on some thinned black acrylic, then wiping it off with a paper towel, leaving some paint in the crevices.
A lot of my armor is sewn vinyl and fabric, with some Crayola Model Magic for sculpted details. I approximated chain mail with a crocheted sweater spraypainted silver and bronze. My totem is sculpted foam painted with acrylics.
The wig is a Punky XL in blue from Cosworx:
http://www.cosworx.com/product.php?productid=16463&cat=2471&page=1 Many hours of styling and almost a whole can of Aquanet went into that bad boy.
This is the wig on my improvised wig head: a pillow cinched onto the top of a vacuum cleaner with a belt.
We're both wearing Razorback teeth from Dental Distortions:
http://www.dentaldistortions.com/product_info.php?products_id=18
Here's a makeup test while I was figuring out how blue I wanted to be. You can see the ears before I painted them ($2 from a Halloween store!) with my earrings in. Also check out the sweet necklace, with real bone beads!
We went to my boyfriend's office party, where we were a big hit.
Comments and criticism welcome! I lived and breathed these costumes for a month so I'm sure I can talk at great length about them
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