Well, for Belle-dar it’s a wrap-up, not so much for Beast. But anyway.
When Chase and I decided to make a Beast costume for him, and wanted it to be for the masquerade, I couldn’t enter the same old Belle I’d entered last year, so I embarked to make some upgrades to it. This was a chance for me to get it a tad closer to the Disney on Ice version I’d originally been inspired by, but the best part is, all of the upgrades are completely removeable. I can change it back to my old regular belle at any time! 🙂
I started out with finding some sequin trim I liked, and put that on the front three seams on the bodice. I had originally planned to put them down each seam on the top gathered part of the skirt, but I didn’t like how divided that made it look so I had a lot left over.
I wanted to add big swoops to the bottom of the gathers – and luckily found some of the same yellow organza I used last year. Since I had brought some white in on the trim, I got some white organza too, and put that behind the yellow – it shows just over the top of it, and helps bolster it. In most pictures it just blends right in, though 🙂 I also did a layer of white behind the yellow organza at the shoulders. It makes the shoulder piece fit so much better!! I didn’t have so much trouble keeping it up this time.
Here is where the hunt for clear sequins came from. I never found them. Since I had sequins on the trim on the bodice now, I wanted clear ones (like the ones on the trim) for a few other places. I ordered from several places online, checked everywhere I could locally – every where had those blue-tinted ones, which just didn’t look right on the yellow (one place I ordered online from – the one I held the most hope for – the sequins didn’t show up until I was AT the con, and then they were just the blue-tinted ones again on top of that). I ended up cutting the sequins off what was leftover of my trim and using those. They’re on the white organza of the shoulder piece, and on the yellow of the big drape at the bottom. I like the plain clear ones because they’re not so obvious, but they catch the light.
The roses were another saga. Everywhere I went, the roses I found that I liked cost more than I was willing to spend. I needed 8 of them, and the cheapest I could find was $7 a piece – I figured if it came down to it I’d just bite the bullet and do it, but I really wanted to find something a little more economical. So I got on ebay and ta-da: a whole bunch of 14 silk yellow roses for $7. Yay 🙂
So I got them, and they weren’t the right shade of yellow, of course. They were a green-ish yellow. So I put them in some yellow dye. After that, they were a much warmer yellow, but still didn’t look right with the dress. So I put them in a red dye. That got them closer, but still not quite it, so I put them in yellow again. That’s where they finally got to the point I liked them LOL After all that, they had a nice gradiant effect on them, with a tad of pink at the edges. I took them apart and glued them back together (since once I took the green stalk at the back off there was nothing holding the petals together anymore) then put some iridescent paint on the uppermost petals. and they were finally done.
The wig was new, too. The headband had new sequins on it, too, and I attached the originally fabric one around a plastic headband to give it some structure (since it had a tendancy to squish up beforehand). Oh, and a few sequins around the top of the gloves, too.
So that was the new Belle.
Ok, freaking Beast.
We started on his head back in – what, April? May? I don’t remember. I think just about every weekend we worked a little on his head, although it mostly came together in the last couple of weeks before Dragoncon.
Here’s Chase with the big foam head.
I added the lipstick.
We originally had a different fur on his face. We realised we didn’t have enough of that to make his tail, hands and feet, so we took it off and found this instead. I was still not 100% happy with the colour of this, but we were running low on options for fur.
Some of the fur was dyed. Some was airbrushed.
Chase wearing the in progress head.
The horns were foam, sealed, painted and airbrushed.
His lips were model magic, which I painted. His teeth were sculpey, with a glaze on top.
Towards the end of the whole project, we ran into both time and financial crunches. I was hoping I had enough leftover loose hair to do the whole back of his mane – I didn’t have near enough, and couldn’t spend all that extra on so many packs of hair. So we had to make due with more of the leftover craft fur – I dyed it and he airbrushed it. It didn’t look perfect, but for now it would do.
We want to pull up the fur in the back, cut down his head some (we both realised it was too big in the back upon seeing video of us after dcon), and replace the fur with hair.
The freaking jacket/shoulders/vest is what nearly made me have a melt down both before Dragoncon and AT Dragoncon.
The main obstacle was just finding time to work on it. We had to wait til after the head was done – which basically left us about four days to get it done (two weeks – but Chase was only here on the weekends to put it on!)
I’m really not happy with the way the whole jacket looks. It doesn’t fit right and just doesn’t *look* right. We never got to put the whole thing on him together before the con.
So three hours before we had to head to the masquerade, we started getting him together, because I was expecting problems. However it was much worse than I expected – it really didn’t fit him at all. We were both on the verge of calling the whole thing off. We ended up having to remove the batting which formed the hump on his back/smoothed it out, and also smoothed out his arms. Because with it in there, it didn’t fit. We also had to chop up the shoulders. The vest had been sewn on one side, and was too high up – once it was on him, the bottom of the vest came to his stomach. At least that part is easily fixable. We’re planning on rebuilding his shoulders from scratch, and building them into a sort-of muscle shirt he puts on first.
The feet and hands and tail ended up being completely last minute. I’d like to tighten them up (especially the feet – I didn’t have him here to try them on when I made them) – and do some airbrushing on them.
I’m just glad we got the whole thing to the point he could at least wear it in the masquerade, after all that work – that was all that mattered to me. We had fun wearing them and the reaction we got was great – after all that drama in the room we ended up leaving late and having to let him wear it over there (we had wanted to cover the head and carry it) we had to run to the hyatt from the marriott without stopping, I felt bad because so many people kept trying to stop us for photos.
Taking these pictures together on this staircase was kinda important to me, since it’s where, last year, we took pics after the masquerade!
I’m not sure when Beast’s next appearance will be… probably something next year? No clue, but after all that work he WILL be wearing it again.