Mad Moxxi Cosplay Review

I'm a huge Borderlands nerd, we all know that. No news here. And I have a gazillion badass bitches from this game that I want to cosplay. Mad Moxxi is one of them. However, her costume is very detailed, has a lot of hand painted work and maaaany accessories so I just never took the time needed to make it. Also this is not really the costume type I usually wear and I was a bit worried that I wouldn't be able to pull her off.

Then one day everything changed when CosplaySky offered me a Moxxi cosplay, as part of a sponsorship deal. Heck yeah, I said! Let's do this!

Here is the link to the cosplay I recieved;

CosplaySky.com - Mad Moxxi Purple

You can also get her red outfit, but I think the purple one is prettier. If you order from CosplaySky you can either get a costume with premade measurements, or you can fill in your own measurements and have it all tailored to fit you exactly. That's what I did and the costume fit like a glove! It was a little big around the waist, but I believe that to be because I lost some weight since I filled in the measurements, and it was easily fixed!

The entire cosplay took about two weeks to make and one week (!) to be delievered. As you know I'm really picky about waiting for mail for a long period of time, haha, so I was super happy and surprised!

The parts included with the costume are as follows;

• Coat
• Hat
• Gloves
• Waist bag
• Two belts
• Striped stocking

Said and done, I threw together a quick test (with a substitute wig and no shoe covers) and I absolutely love it! I never thought I was gonna be able to pull this cosplay off, but I think I can actually do this!!

The entire coat is fully lined and everything from the fabric, seams and lining to the buttons, prints and details are just perfect and so carefully attached. No hot-glue buttons here! Even the hat is lined, which is a big deal for me haha <3 They even added Moxxi's off button which is larger than the others, and they look great together.

Something else that I really love is that all the decorations, swirls, patches and logos are actually printed onto the fabric! It looks very realistic and professional.

The belts, gloves and bag are all made out of pleather and are attached with velcro. The striped sock is made out of knitted fabric and stretches up top.

Although there are several buttons visible on the costume, the entire coat opens and closes with invisible snap-buttons. This is nice because the outside buttons never lose their shape and symmetry, and the snap buttons works perfectly fine on their own!

Time for some ratings!

• Comfort: 4/5 
• Size: 5/5
• Accuracy to original: 5/5
• Movability: 3/5
• Quality: 5/5

All in all I'm super satisfied with my cosplay <3 It looks exactly as the original Moxxi costume from the game does, all the details are included and the quality is amazing. I really recommend CosplaySky if you ever want to order a costume yourself!!

I've made a video review of the cosplay as well, check it out down below!

Thanks for reading <3

Basic Female and Male Cosplay Makeup Tutorial

Basic Female and Male Cosplay Makeup Tutorial

Right, so I got SOO many good tips from you guys on tutorials I should make, so I'm starting off with this one! It's a simple, very basic tutorial on how to lay a foundational makeup for female and male characters. On top of this, you can add whatever characteristic makeup your characters might have

.

As stated before, this is just how I personally do it, I'm sure there are other ways that might even work better for you, but this is my personal routine Smiley smile

List of products used are found in the video's description!

Bloody Mary - The Wolf Among Us - Makeup test

Bloody Mary - The Wolf Among Us

Finally took time to actually do this makeup! I so wanna cosplay Bloody Mary some day Smiley heart

Used eyeshadow, derma wax and fake blood for this, eyes (obviously) shooped because this is only a test, and the mirror shards are cut out of a bunch of silver envelopes haha </3


Process; 

• Lined the facial structure with celshading lines. 
• Lined eyes with tons of eyeliner to darken them.
• Painted on eyebrows and the final celshade lines
• Drew her tattoos using reuglar grey eyeshadow and an angled brush
• Cut out the mirror shards out of a silver envelope
• Glued them on with spirit gum and covered the edges with derma wax
• (The shard in my hair is put in place with hair pins) 
• Added tonnnnnnnnns of fake blood
• Done! 

Gaige - Borderlands 2

Gaige - Borderlands 2

Bio
Character: Gaige the Mechromancer
Origin: Borderlands 2
Year constructed: 2014
Debuted at: Comic Con Gamex Sthlm
2014

Why
Gaige is a badass. I love her introductionary echo logs, I love her attitude, her outfits and her constant references to pop culture. She's totally kickass. I also love that she's got SO many trinkets and accessories, there's just so much going on in her costume! I wanted to make a Borderlands cosplay for a long time, but since I never done it before I didn't want to start off too hard, so gaige seemed like a good place to start. I wanted to finish her for Gamex because my bro Johannes was making a Psycho and my bf was making Axton (which he sadly couldn't finish in time due to school attacking.)

The wig was made from
scratch using an eBay wig.

How
I started with making the wig, actually. I bought a long wig from ebay (actually I bought several because I couldn't decide upon the color, but I ended up with an orange one), which I cut off to the proper length. The cut hair was used to make the ponytails later. I basically glued the loose hair into two ponytails, fastened them into her "scrunchies" and sewed them on to the head. For a full tutorial on how I made the wig, please visit my cosplay page!

I thought long and hard on how to style her ponytails - I wasn't sure if I wanted to make them natural (like in the photo to the left) or give them their original spiky, cartoony character. But in the end I went for spiky. I backcombed the hair and parted them in different spikes and sprayed with hairspray. After that I combed over the outer layer on each spike to make them smooth. The absolute tips of each spike was glued together with just a little bit of wood glue, to prevent the spikes from "opening".

I made the pleated skirt a
bit too long.....

Tights in the making!

The rest of the cosplay was pretty basic. A regular pleated skirt, a hooded jacket and a pair of striped tights. I didn't find any good black and white striped fabric, so I had to make my own by cutting out lengths of fabric and sewing them together. To do this it's easiest to find a fabric that stretches in four ways, but two-way stretch can also work. I made a full tutorial on how to do this which you will find on my facebook page.

For the applications, badges and other symbols on her clothes I used acrylic paint mixed with fabric paint, to give it a rough, cartoony feel.

Goggles! Worbla and craft foam, huge
shoutout to Violet Cosplay who gave me some
great advice on celshading!

I made the goggles from worbla and craft foam. You'll notice that almost ALL of her gadgets are made out of craft foam in my case - mostly because I needed something easy and fast to work with, but also because it's pretty durable and can look cartoony. But actually the most important reason was because she has a lot of her gadgets attached to her belt I needed to make them light weight!

For all the celshading, I used markers in different colors and thickness. Basically I tracked the outlines with a dark marker and highlighted the outer edges with a white marker. There is no easy way to explain this really, it's best to just try and play around with it! :)

Domo arigatooo mr robotoooo

Robot arm time! This was made using worbla, because I wanted it to be durable. However I made the fingers in craft foam because they are more comfortable and softer, but you can use whatever! As mentioned before, I have a full tutorial on this overat my fb page, so I'll just run through it fast here. I basically taped my arm with masking tape, drew the patterns on the tape, removed the tape and cut out the patterns. Then I just traced the patterns on to worbla, cut it out and glued it onto an arm sock which I had sewed earlier (it's basically a long, black glove that reaches up over my shoulder). I painted it before I attached it though, with basic metallic spray paint as base and acrylics for details. What's important here is that you adjust the pieces so that they don't prevent your arm movement. You'll probably be wearing it for a while so might as well make it comfortable, right?

MORE GUNS!

I also needed a weapon right! For this I was really lazy, I took one of my old NERF-guns which I have laying around the house (don't ask) and modified it a bit to look more Borderlandsy. I covered the printed logos and fixed it up to make it more neutral, and then I spray painted it black. Since I'm a Maliwan-fan and Gaige uses elemental guns, I went for the Maliwan color scheme of grey, orange, white and turquoise. This was so much fun to make, haha, and it could actually shoot small foam bullets hahaha <3

I sadly don't have any good photos of all the trinkets, but they include (but are not limited to) a piston, two belts, a padlock, a hammer with helt, two arm bands, a couple of metal bands, a wrench with bag, some more straps and two necklaces with bolts. They were all painted cartoony and celshaded. I loved my little foam hammer since I could go around smacking people without hurting anyone (just ask my Psycho Johannes) <3

Thoughts

I had tons of fun in this costume. It is so comfy, I love the makeup attached to it and I love all the shenanigans me and my Psycho were up to at Gamex! Gaige is  also a very fun cosplay to shoot since you get to be all over the place, make faces and pose like a maniac (compared to for example my Nuala cosplay in which you need to be still, calm and fragile).

Now, I've mentioned a lot of tutorials for this costume! The ones I have made for Gaige are;

How to make Gaige's wig
How to make Gaige's robot arm
How to make Gaige's gun
How to make Gaige's general costume

You will find all of them here!

Photos
Click for larger versions!

Gamex selfie!

To hell with the first law!

Gamex!

With my bro Johannes!

  

POW!!

Mad Moxxi Makeup Tutorial Video

I promised you a tutorial and here it is! It's hard to do makeup while recording so it didn't turn out as good as I wanted it to, haha, plus the camera somehow compressed the format into some weird widescreen format?? Idk.

Watch if you feel like it! <3

Mad Moxxi Makeup test

Mad Moxxi - Borderlands 2

BOOBS. Hah, got your attention! No but seriously, there is some serious boob magic going on here, because I DO NOT possess the amazing bewbs of Mad Moxxi. Makeup and super bras, I tell you.

Completely spontaneous closet-makeup test, felt like I needed more Borderlands happening in my life right now. Moxxi is a total babe and I since revealing cosplays aren't really what I usually do, I wanted to try it out because why the hell not. With Militarystuck Eridan's hat to add the extra unf, of course. Eridan's after all the hottest of them all <3

Quick run through; 

Makeup base; White face paint. Simple as that.

Contouring: Not much, some light grey to controur the cheekbones and temples. 

Eyes: Pink eyeshadow on lids with a touch of white in the center for a glowy feel. Bronze roughe for the shading up towards the eyebrows.

Lips: Red lipstick as base. Dark purple eyeshadow in each mouth corner, blended into the red. The white glow on the lower lip is just a bit dabbed on white eyeliner.

Cheeks; Light pink roughe. Decided on going for a more blended look rather than her iconic red dots. 

Boobs: Two bras, two rolled up socks and hecka lot contouring and shadowing!

Will see if I finishe this cosplay in the future, maybe <3

One of the best reasons to keep cosplaying

I had to think a long time before posting this photo online, since I don't know the little girl in the photo (and also cause my face looks like a bag of poop due to photo being snapped in the middle of a laugh). But I did it anyways.

This little girl was so happy to see me dressed up as Anna at the cinema (my job, this was during "Children's Day") today, she didn't know what to do, she just couldn't stop smiling. And she almost didn't want to let go of my hand after we took the photo!

It's when I see photos like this one that every hour I've spent stressing out over cosplay is suddenly worth it. It's worth everything.

This kind of reaction is priceless.

Cosplay is amazing.

Look at her smile!