This is the first post to go over my cosplay of Eiger from Shadowrun: Dragonfall.  This is really more for my reference to give me something to go back for future projects as well as a way to see my progress from project to project.  If this helps anyone else or anyone finds amusing, that's great too!  This is going to be really lengthy.  Sorry.



Eiger was my first real cosplay and my eyes were bigger than my stomach on this one.  The build was far beyond what I was comfortable with when I started and I spent a lot of time playing with EVA foam, tearing apart pieces that didn't work, using the wrong thickness for the wrong purposes, and generally cursing myself for reaching too far.   But, in the end, I learned a great deal and I feel pretty confident in my EVA skills to tackle similar projects in the future.  I don't know that I would suggest a person tackle something like this right out of the gate, but if I survived it, I'm sure others can. I learned a lot about craft foam and foam board. I also learned a great deal about all the stupid shit I got wrong.  Hopefully I won't repeat those mistakes.  :)

First things first, this was not only my first time doing a cosplay of any substantial work (Kuranosuke was done for the same event, but all I had to do with her was alter a pair of boots and hot pants), it was my first time working with many of the materials used in the costume.  I also made some HUGE rookie mistakes that resulted in pieces that I know I could have done better, even given my relative beginner status.

I am going to go through each piece of the costume in their own post to talk about my thoughts on both the process and the finished product.  I will also go over how I feel I could have done better.  I didn't take many in-progress pictures but I will take some more as I repair some pieces before Geekylogic and I do a shoot with a professional photographer.

Lets start from the ground up, eh?  BOOTS.  I made these with a combination of 1/2 inch EVA foam from mats, craft foam, heavy duty snaps and velcro, and using a pair of boots with a two inch platform and a four inch chunky heel.  I started by outlining the souls of the boots onto some EVA foam, I added about 1.5 inches around the outline of the soul shape with a little extra space at the front and cut out five of these for each foot.  I applied some heat to the "toes" of these pieces and bent them slightly upward.  I then layered the foam pieces on top of one another using high temp glue for glue.  The last piece, I cut around the outline of the base of the boot itself and then glued this into place on the top of the other pieces.

Using some of the scrap pieces, I cut and shaped four pieces to fill the gap between the platform of the boot and the heel.  I then glued the the boots onto the foam sole inside the shape cut out of the top layer.  The combination of the foam layers and the four inches from the heel gave me almost enough height to be in line with the height of a troll from Shadowrun.

While I waited for the above stuff to dry, I cut half ellipses for each toe piece.  I made them large enough to fit over the toes of the boot and extend outward over the extra space on the boots.  The reason for the last bit was to make up for the length I lost on the feet due to the boot heel.  I applied heat to the foam, shaped, applied heat, shaped, so on and so forth until I had roughly the shape I wanted.  When applying this shape to the boot, I realized it didn't curve enough, so I cut a small triangle from the top of each piece to allow it to curve some more.  I then glued these to the EVA foam surrounding the boot toes.

I then cut 1/2 to 1 inch strips of EVA to use for the skeleton around the boot.  I used my embossing gun to shape the EVA to the curves I needed.  This is where I started to wish I had drawn things out before I started cutting (something I struggled with for the entire build.  I do things too much through eyeballing).  I had to redo the skeleton multiple times and in the end, I still had a skeleton that wasn't accurate.  To make matters worse, the skeleton for each boot didn't even match!  I reached a point where my concern over time needed for the breastplate out weighed my desire to get the boots accurate.

After getting to the "good enough" state with the skeleton, I began thinking about how to get into the boots themselves.  I decided the best way would be to cut the skeleton vertically down the insides of the boots.  The cuts were made between the inside struts and allowed for some give in order to get my feet into the things.   My next hurdle with this idea was how to close the opening once my feet were in.  I cut some pieces pieces to span the distance between skeleton struts, detached at one end.  On this end I attached the items to join the pieces together.  To join the pieces I initially tried heavy duty adhesive velcro.  I had used this in the past for a variety of uses and found the adhesive to be strong and lasting and the velcro to hold fast even while under a great deal of strain.  I was confident that this would work well.  It didn't.  The velcro turned out to hold much stronger than the adhesive did to the foam.  The first attempt to detach one side of the velcro from its mate resulted in the adhesive completely delaminating from the velcro strips themselves.  I tried using high temp hot glue to attach the velcro and found that it couldn't hold against the pull of the unbreakable love of two mated pieces of velcro.  Nothing seemed to want to keep this stuff in place against it.  Looking through my sewing and crafting crap, I noticed some heavy duty snaps and thought I'd give them a try.  After some trial and error, I found it worked pretty well.  There was some attachment issues with these as well, but not nearly as bad as the velcro.  I used hot glue to secure it and that seemed to work well for a while, but eventually one side would pull away from the foam when separating the snaps.  I then tried a combination of hot glue and screwing the the inside of the snaps into the foam.  This worked a bit better and was finally the route I took using Goop instead of the hot glue.

Once that was finished I tried to cover the rest of the skeleton.  Thinking the toe piece worked well, I thought I'd use the 1/2 inch foam to fill out the rest of the boot.  It only took me a short time to realize this was a terrible idea.  After pulling it all off, I restarted with craft foam.  While this was much easier and gave some flex to the boots, I was not happy with the look.  This was due to poor planning on the skeleton as much the material itself.  I'm not certain what I would use in place of it, however.  Pleather, maybe?  Anyway, it covered it well using some hot glue to attach it to the skeleton. I used a combination of light duty snaps and velcro sewn into the craft foam to join the cover over the opening on the skeleton to enable me get the boots on.  Once this was done, I primed and painted using black Plasti-dip and acrylic paint.

After walking around in the boots for a while, I felt I needed to add something to be grippy on the soles.  The EVA wasn't TOO slippery, but I wanted to be certain I would roll and ankle due to a lack of purchase on tile or wood.  For this I used the rubber tread strips used on truck running plates.  Cutting these to the shape of the soles, I used high temp hot glue to attach them and they worked like a charm.

The finished product worked, but I am not happy with it.  It added the height I needed, but made my feel look too short, resulting in a cartoonish chunky look that was exaggerated by the overly wide width of the rest of the boot.  The skeleton posed a lot of problems, some of which would have been avoided by sketching and using foam board for mockups. This would have resulted in a slimmer and more accurate skeleton and boot.  For the skeleton itself, I would like to experiment with a smaller amount of supports and struts or even try something like wire for it.  I think this should allow for a much sleeker result.  For the details and the toe pieces I would like to try something like sintra in the future.  As I mentioned above, while the craft foam worked for the "skin" of the boots, I don't like the look of it.  It looks really slapdash.  I want to try a different material next time, maybe pleather or PVC, maybe.  The layers of the EVA foam for the soles worked amazingly well.  It allowed a bit of give that made walking in the boots a bit easier.  That said, walking in these things was not easy.  The bulk of the boots themselves cause issues and this was exacerbated by the fact that the boots were half a size too small for my feet.  Walking around the boots before I started and after I finished the boot build, it seemed like it would be just fine.  But I only walked around in them for maybe 45 minutes at a time.  This was a HUGE problem when standing and walking around in the costume for 5-6 hours.  After getting out of the boots my feet were numb, bleeding in the heel, and the big toe on my right foot had popped out of the socket and was angled in a very disturbing fashion.  The texture of the cover didn't look ideal from a distance and the bulk of the skeleton I created meant I couldn't add the armor plates that would have been faithful to the reference images.

On the whole, I learned a good deal and the result worked okay.  It wasn't the main thing of the costume that people noticed anyway, but I will try to redo it for the professional shoot if I have the time.  Otherwise I will take what I learned here and do better in the future.

I will tackle the armor plates for the boots and knees in the next post. I will try to post some better pictures of the boots in the next few days.