Van

Photo by EBK. Wasabi Con '10, Denver CO

I must admit that Gun X Sword is nowhere near the top of my favourite series, but it has its moments. I mostly cosplayed Van because I adore his character design.

Let's just work our way down:

- The hat is two cheap fedoras glued to each other for height. I did the brim in the same fashion as Hazel's. The ring is a 6 gauge copper wire, annealed for the circular shape and then painted gold.

- As per usual, I made the pattern for the jacket. The silver tips on the end of each strap is hand-sawed 21 gauge aluminum sheeting. The arm bits are craft foam, enforced with wire, spray painted 239483 times, and then epoxied on to the fabric.

- The shirt simply had its collar chopped off, to be replaced with a new embroidered one. The buttons were also painted black.

- The gloves are from ebay; the cheapest leather ones I found were cheaper than faux-leather. I considered embroidering the pattern on but decided that it wasn't raised enough. So I cheaped out and used fabric paint.

- The sword sort of drove me mad. The anime version has NO concept of physics. I had to enforce the hilt with wire that normally wouldn't be there. The larger gold pieces are styrofoam coated with paperclay; I ran out of time to put more than one coat of paint on 'em. The flat 'metal' is again craft foam.