Gamora Costume tutorial

 Now that All-Con is over, I finally have time to write this post! I was seriously still working on this costume the night before we left. I ran into one snag after another in making this but finally managed it after much guessing and failing and correcting. And spending.  LOTS of spending. Way more than I'd expected.  Cost of materials on my body here is maybe in the $150 range, but actual cost of making this was closer to $420ish. So there's that.

 All that aside, I had fun wearing this! So, here's the how. 

Gamora's costume consists of a one-piece open sided jumpsuit, a mesh tank top, boots, knee guard pad cover things, a collar, belt and holster (or, at least, holster-type thing) and guard/gauntlet type arm bands. Those were tricky. More on that later.

The jumpsuit itself was the easiest part. I wasn't really sure how to make the pattern initially, so I just put on a tight fitting tee and drew the pattern on one side and then cut it out.

I drew out the whole top part, but I only defined and cut out one half.

Here it is flat, with the back on the left and the front on the right. I put the back part on the fold of the blue fabric and then cut one big piece and sewed it at the shoulders and front. 

Then I cut black vinyl pleather material and covered the back and under the arms, and then used a black athletic mesh fabric on each side of the front of the vest from the bottom all the way up to the collar. After that, I made a simple pair of leggings and sewed the top to the bottom to make a jumpsuit, and painted on the blue squiggly designs. In the movie, the area around the knee appears to be an attached knee guard like in motorcycle pants. I couldn't find any material that would work for that, so I ended up cutting up some ribbed leggings and just pulling them on over the pants.  Not ideal and I intend to keep looking, but it'll work for now!

 I made Gamora's collar and holster both from fun foam (I think fun foam may be a defunct brand name because no one ever knows what I mean by that.  I'm talking about that thin craft foam.)

This is the rough outline of the collar

I cut it out and heated it with a heat gun and molded it over my body double. It's not as complicated as it seems, I promise!

Here it is finished and painted with Plasti-Dip. I had to add wires on the inside because since it's not attached to anything, it had a tendency to want to go flat again. The wire helped it to hold its shape. 

 Okay, the gauntlets were tricky. I just wasn't sure how they were made! I looked at other tutorials and I didn't like the ways I had seen them done. Then I looked at scenes from the movie till I was cross-eyed but I finally came up with A Plan.

Okay, I'm going to do my best to describe this. I didn't have any sort of pattern, I had to completely wing it when it came to these. Basically, I wrapped canvas around my arm and marked a thumb hole. Then, I marked long, tapered strips, long enough to wrap around my arm two or three times. They pass through slits at the base of the brace. I have a vague recollection of long ago seeing something like a medical brace with a similar construction? I don't remember exactly what but if you know what I'm talking about it will help you visualize this. Then I added the blue contrasting fabric and buckles to hold the tapered ends in place, and a snap on the inside to hold the thumb flap down.

The cords around her leg kept slipping. I solved this by making two narrow bands of shelf liner to put under the cords. They didn't move all day!

The makeup was Skin Illustrator FX alcohol ink airbrushed on by my patient boyfriend.  I did her facial scars with Mehron Rigid Collodion under the ink, then added a bit of color to them with eyeliner and eyeshadow after the ink was dry.  I felt that the green ink by itself was too dark, and I plan on adding some yellow next time I do this. I also thinned the ink with alcohol for a more translucent look. I want to go on the record as saying I could not find anywhere that said it was okay to do this in any way! I didn't have any problems at all, I'm just sayin'.

For her wig, I harvested wefts from a pink wig that I had and just sewed them along the hairline. Since the pink wefts are about the same length as the brown, I think I'll need to trim the brown a little.  Theres a few pics where you can't see the pink at all!

So that's that.  I'm sure I'm missing a few things but I covered the important bits!