Anonymous asked: Uh hi! I'm pretty new to cosplaying and i was wondering if you could help me with my Eridan (Wig, pants and gills) and a little with the personality. I saw you at the panel (video) and i must say you make an AMAZING Eridan!
I’ve had a couple of people ask me for how I did my Eridan wig, and I’m not totally sure why because I think it’s fairly terrible - however, I’ll give what tips I can.
It started out as a black wig that was actually styled for Kanaya, so there were a TON of layers in it. I styled it after Alice’s hair from the Twilight movie, so that was about what it looked like in terms of layering. For Eridan, I essentially slicked it all back with hairspray and a blow drier and spiked it up in the back a bit. For the purple part, I cut a piece off an old wig and sewed it underneath the Eridan wig, so that when the hair was slicked back you couldn’t see the edge. I cut small holes in the wig cap for horns to go through. It has several bobby pins in various places to keep it slicked back.
For the pants, I basically just made a pair of jeans in terms of style. However, what I did for the stripes is take two colors of corduroy and rip them into about three inch wide strips. I then sewed them into one big piece of striped fabric and treated this as my fabric when cutting out my pattern and sewing the pants.
I haven’t seen any other Eridan cosplayers do this, and it would certainly be less time-consuming to paint stripes on. If you choose to paint stripes, be sure to use tape to get perfectly straight, crisp lines.
I…don’t really deal with gills. At one time I had small “fins” to wear over my ears that looked really great, but I’m not sure where I bought them (link, anyone who knows what I mean?) and I lost one of them soon after wearing them for the first time. I’m kind of shocked that nobody has bitched at me for this, but apparently nobody really cares?? We just don’t know.
In terms of personality…Okay, so for panels I’ve found that you get a much better reaction if you give the people what they want. I tend to play up the “fanon” interpretation of Eridan - i.e., a huge whiny douchebag who loathes landwellers and really really wants a date. That’s not REALLY what he’s like in canon (although it is if you paint him with broad strokes, which is what fanon tends to do), but when you’re doing a panel and you’ve got at most 30 seconds to answer a question, go for the broad humor over subtle character. Whine a lot about how nobody likes you, sneer at the audience and your fellow panel members, sulk if anybody insults you, take any opportunity to insult Sollux in particular, plead with Feferi to be your friend again, and beg Karkat for relationship advice.
