Thorin Oakenshield
Cosplay Commission for Amy H. & Chris M.
August 2014
This was an incredibly involved pair of costumes! Two of the same character, one for a man and the other for a woman. The costumes totaled 4 garments and 4 sets of accessories each. The vast majority all needed to be made in leather to maintain authenticity. We spent alot of time researching the original movie costumes to be able to accurately replicate them for the clients.
The first grment was the undershirt in pale blue linen. The shirts are basic poet shirts with manderin collars and lace up fronts, but with a differance in shape to accomodate the differances in the male and female costumes. We divided the top front into a 4 panel chevron yoke and hand stitched the eyelets. They were laced up with dyed deerskin cord.
Next up was the armored jerkin. These were custom draped patterns, with extra darts for the lady's garment made out of blue suede garment leather and Hong Kong finished. The sleeves were quilted in a geometric pattern and hand laced to the body, along with the over sleeves. Finally, the jerkin was covered in almost 200 resin caste scales made by FEV Studios that were all hand painted and aged by myself. Each jerkin has it's own custom pattern of scales.
The surcoat presented a few additional problems. When researching the movie costumes, we learned that the fabric used for them not only, didn't
exsist anymore, but had originally been a silver greythat the wardrobe depatrtment had dyed. So we had to figure out how to make it ourselves. We first worked on dying the color to match. Using test strips of silk velvet we did a number of mix tests with fiber reactive dyes until we felt we'd gotten an accurate match. Next was embossing the velvet. after a bit of research, I ended up Vectoring the design in Illustrator, and we sub contracted another fabricator to CNC the pattern into a high density foam. This I then painstakingly ironed into the velvet nap. We used a cotton velvet for the boarder to provide a contrast and because it would stand up better to wear and tear than the silk.
Next was the cloak, bracers and boots. The cloak was almost 4 yards of distressed leather, floor length with side slitd for the sword scabbards. They were trimmed in faux wolf's fur styled. The boots had cast resin toe tips, and dyed leather panels adheared on the heel and sides. The fur was the same as the trim, styled and with hand stamped leather belts and cast resin buckles.
The bracers were more difficult. We needed an embossed leather that was still smooth and able to be painted. After a quick mockup, we decided to do layers
of various leathers with a styreen cutout for the pattern. We used a milled leather for the arm wrap, then a wet molded thick vegtan leather for the bracer proper. After vectoring the design, we had the design cut on a laser cutter and heat molded it to the curved bracer. This was then covered in a thin lambskin and top stitched onto the veg tan.
In total the two costumes took four months and approximately 1400 hours to complete with a great deal of help from many artists. My own contributions included all the patterning, cutting, vector design, dyeing, embossing and mockups. As well as building the bracers and boots and painting/adhearing the scales
