Hi, I'm RedVirtue. As many of you know, I'm an avid Capcom gamer. But before anything else, I'm a Street Fighter player. That being said, I love Street Fighter and I have played it since the good ol' Arcade days.

Throughout the years I've become fastinated by many art mediums, from paintings, to music, to sculpture. I am now skimming through Cosplay the past few years and I've always wanted to make an elaborate Street Fighter Cosplay.

In my very short experience of observing and creating cosplay I've seen very good and less then stellar cosplays out there, and I definately didn't want to be marked as the less then stellar. I think the first problem people make when choosing a character to cosplay is choosing a character they "like" instead of choosing a character they can respectively pull off and make a convincing "acheivement".
But hey, i also understand cosplay is about having fun too!

Most that know me also know I'm not a real life heavy weight street fighter. Sure, I've studied three different forms of martial arts but I'm nowhere close to being as big as the World Warriors in SF. So that slimmed my options. If I were to choose a muscle-bound character like say, Sagat, I would already be shooting myself in the foot if I want to create a convincing cosplay.

It was easy for me to choose Q. I'm actually not much of a Q user, but I always liked his design. SFA and SFIII have some of the most creative characters of the series. I also like how little is known about the character himself.

Here is the starting process of how I'm creating the Mysterious, Q.

I first had to put a blad cap on and attach it to myself using Spirit Gum. Spirit Gum is a form of glue that is generally safe for your skin if you don't have sensitive skin. then i used a vasiline type jelly for any facial hair, including my eyebrows and eyelashes. Otherwise they would get ripped out in the following process. Then I mixed Alginate powder with water to create a oozy putty material. I sat back on a chair where others helped put slather this stuff on me down to my shoulders while i sat still. then my help put bandages that harden around the Alginate to make sure it all stays in place. There was also a person souly incharge of making sure I was able to breath through the process (very important lol).

The bandages become a shell and the alginate dries into a flexible material. The two halves of the shell are removed after about fourty minutes to an hour. The alginate self-adheres to the shell so it all comes off at once. which is good because it's the shell that holds the alginate together like an exoskeleton.

 Once it's removed from me the two halves are quickly put back togerther and plaster is poured into it. The plaster dries and the mold shell is removed leaving a mold of my noggin.

 then I placed clay over the bust and sculpted Q's likeness. I figured since I'm already going all out on this mask, I'd use high quality Oakley lenses for his eyes.

More to come as I continue working on the mask and the rest of the costume!