I've been bouncing a couple ideas back and forth for what costume I'm going to make for Emerald City Comicon, and my friend and I have finally come up with doing Firefly characters. She will be doing Inara and I will be doing Kaylee, for which my production sketch is shown below:
In my opinion no cosplay should be exact for several reasons: its not personal or creative enough, the original was either cobbled together from what the designer found or had on hand, or it was a drawing that either was inconceivable in the real world or not detailed enough to be interesting. Don't get me wrong, I understand that if you change the costume too much it's not the character anymore, but to me it's the essence of the character that counts. So that's what I've done here with my Trikucian as Kaylee.
On Kaylee's coveralls she has several appliques. I've found different ones that would work, as well as some old pillow covers I'll cannibalize for their embroidery. It's the sort of thing that would have worked for her thrifty character anyways. I will have videos up relatively soon of my process of constructing the costume, as well as of me wearing it at the convention. I'll also wear one of my tie-dyes under the coveralls both to save money and give it a personal flair.
As for the drawing, I personally like drawing it out and then coloring it in by hand, rather than on the PC like my other art pieces, so I can have a feeling for the costume. It helps me work out how I'm going to pattern it out and put it all together. I commonly make the patterns for my costumes, but in this case it will be easy because I'll be making it nice and baggy, with a little bit of elastic in the back. Again, I know that's not exactly how it was in the show, but I have a curvier figure than Jewel Staite.
That's another thing I noticed, is that when someone is cosplaying a western character people are less rigid about exactitude. I think they really should be about Japanese characters as well, but that's how cosplay has evolved today, and that's something I really do think makes it less creative and more a hobby of perfectionism. I look at creativity as bringing something new to the table, and a lot of cosplays I see are either just copies of artwork or of how other people did it. I appreciate the work that went into those pieces, don't get me wrong, and they can be very beautiful, but I want to see people put their own flair into the project. Those are the best costumes in my opinion.
