BIG DADDY & LITTLE SISTER

COSPLAY ANTHOLOGY PROJECT

THE COSPLAY. For this Bioshock cosplay set my friend and I wanted to find something that took our size differences into play. We ended up settling on a Little Sister and a Big Daddy concept.

My love for Bioshock resonates deeply with my lifelong love for the ocean. I remember playing this game when it first came out back in 2007. It was so different in an environmental setting than any other game I had played up to that point. The whole underwater aesthetic paired with the dystopian 1960s theme sparked my imagination. Bioshock drew me in so much. It was one of the only games that I had played all the way through to compilation, which is very rare as I tend to get bored halfway through.

My Big Daddy is the most challenging cosplay that I have attempted to this point. I had no clue on how to go about foam smithing, as I had never dabbled in that part of cosplay before. I knew that I had wanted to incorporate my patchworking into the foam. Most of the diving suit is built with the thin foam sheets you can get at big-box stores. The thin foam sheets that I was using had a pre-built in feature that was helpful in the patchworking process: adhesive backing! With the help adhesive backing, I was able to cut out the shapes I wanted and layer them on top of each other. After I had laid my pieces on my base, I outlined them in hot glue to give them that gritty weld job impression.

The Little Sister cosplay was a repurposed dress I had from an old retired cosplay. I took tons of different blue fabrics and pinned them all over the dress. I used purple and blue thread to sew them all up and give it the beautiful color blend I was going for. I also sewed on lots of blue butterfly buttons since in the Little Sister concept art she is holding a Blue Morpho butterfly. I wanted to give a little nod to that beautiful piece of art.

BIO. I have a unique take on cosplay, I enjoy taking a character’s design and tweaking it to make it my own. I find most character designs have a slightly boring feel to them when translated to the physical world: They tend to lose their charm and magic. I have been working on developing my own style and take on cosplay. Which leads me the ability to make the clothing and props to appear more interesting to the eye. I find if I treat each project I take on as a living sculpture instead of a flat piece of costumery: each piece is given life and story all its own.

The patchwork aspect of these pieces that I make is a translated representation of my thought process. When I was younger, I would go to craft shows with my mom and her friend. There would always be a quilting competition at these shows. The quilts always fascinated me; the way that some people could place pieces of fabric together to give the quilt a painting-like feel. They would “paint with fabric"; I would hear that phrase all the time and it stuck with me. Eventually, I would like to get to that skill level to emulate this process.

COSPLAY BY EMILY
@PATCHWORK_COSPLAY / @UNPATCHED.COSPLAY

PHOTOGRAPHY AND DESIGN BY BRIAN NISHIMOTO
@B.NISHIMOTO / @THECOSPLAYERANNUAL

PATCH & SNAP PRODUCTIONS
@PATCHANDSNAP