Wednesday, October 28, 2015

DIY Ender Dragon Costume AGAIN!

Okay, I KNOW! I should become the Mom-of-an-Ender-Dragon-Lover blog. But this is big!!


THE FREAKING EYES LIGHT UP!!

The Big Kid keeps telling me that it was my idea to add glowing eyes, but I'm not entirely sure that I believe her. My idea or not, I got stuck with the actual act of making he eyes glow, and we had a couple of hours to kill at a local hackerspace (the Big Kid was 3D printing a comb) so that was the perfect time to do it.

I'm going to admit my very non-creative idea was to cut the shape of the eyes from card stock, paint it to look like the Ender Dragon's eyes, and put a purple glow stick behind it.

Yes, it's laughable.

Thank GOODNESS for people that are way smarter than me, because when I explained what I was wanting to do, Trish and Jasper (the hosts at the Lab that night) jumped in and we left with this epicness.


Really, I can't tell you how it was done. I went to Target to get some purple LED lights and a 9V battery, and the magicians (*cough* electricians? engineers? LED Gods/Goddesses?) in the lab did everything else.

WAIT! I poked the holes into the box where the LEDs were to go, and painted white pixels on the back of the frosted acrylic so the eyes would be accurate.


The light doesn't shine as brightly where it's more opaque. It was a small detail that I wasn't sure would have much of an impact, but it does a surprisingly good job of keeping the eyes pixelated. SCORE!!

Not that that compares at all to all of the other work that went into it.

I have told the Big Kid that there will be no more changes to this costume. It has reached peak awesomeness.

She may take that as a challenge. 

For those of you who are new to this, the Ender Dragon costume has been a work-in-progress for two years.

It started out as a store-bought Enderman head and became this sad costume with flaps of fabric for wings (details here).


Then she asked for better wings to wear to ComiCon, so we built a set of articulating wings and called it "done" (details here).


Well, it was obviously not "done".


Semi-related (in that it's still Halloween), here's my house this year.


It's not much different than last year, but we have a projector in the front window, projecting creepy Halloween scenes (AtmosFEARfx, if anyone's interested). There are also some witches by the front door, but I need to tweak the lighting on them because no photo of them has turned out well. You know I'll share one if I take one!!

How's your Halloween decorating/costume-making-or-buying coming along? I'd LOVE to hear!!

1 comment:

  1. hey gina I think your kid is so creative those designs look really I think you should let him take charge of the entire process though I have a cheap writing services that could offer help you can contact me if you need it

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