Starcraft II Ghost and Spectre
It will be hard for me to fully capture the emotions and lessons learned behind this costume in a single blog post. However I believe it is important for all future fabricators to understand the good that accompanies each joy and frustration within the process of creation.
This costume began with the love of a game that provides those same emotions.
After looking at countless (self taken) screen-caps of Bizzard Entertainment’s Star Craft II: Wings of Liberty we decided to bring to life the uniforms of two different Terran psychic espionage factions.
Spectre
Ghost
The “ghost” is an elite stealth operative with exceptional telepathic and telekinetic powers (Kenyon). The special ops “spectre” units share these psionic abilities as well, but in contrast to the governed, duteous division of ghosts, the spectres are pugnacious. Many spectres were elite ghost agents that were exposed to a psionic boosting drug known as terrazine… by the way…
How pumped are you to know this?!?!
Alright, alright, I digress.
ARMOR SECTION
We began designing the costume in either August or September of 2010.
We had discovered many promising forums and methods to help us make our vision real. If I remember correctly we experimented with three different mediums for our armor before we discovered EVA foam from a veteran fabricator Evil FX (please learn from his genius: http://bioweapons.wordpress.com).
Raw form of EVA Foam. You may have seen it lining gyms, or garage floors.
From the detailed log Evil FX kept of his Mass Effect 2 N7 Armor Build we were able to understand the technique.
- Make a pattern of your armor
- Cut the pattern out of your EVA foam
- Heat the cut piece of EVA foam in a preheated oven at about 240 degrees
- Pull the piece out after 5-15 minutes ( practice with some pieces you don’t care about first)
- Mold it to the shape you want and make sure it stays that way for a few minutes ( don’t push too hard with fingers)
After you have formed all of you shapes you need to assemble them.
*Note that it is much easier to make complicated shapes with several pieces. Instinct tries to tell you that molding one large piece of foam into an irregular shape will be best, but unfortunately the foam does not shape like play-doh.
My piece of leg armor was made out of five shaped pieces of foam.
*I left the ankle area open to increase flexibility and to make it easier to put on.
This is the leg before the pieces were glued together. It was being held together with safety pins.
Forged through blood sweat and tears
After your armor is shaped, and you have a basic idea for how the pieces should fit together, you will want to make them fit flush to each other.
I did this by dremeling their edges to slopes and having them overlap.
This is one edge that will overlap another. This one looks rough because it’s not finished ^_^
Once the dremeling is complete you can reassemble it to make sure everything fits flush.
See how the slopes overlap?
As you can see I over-dremeled some areas on the inside, but shhh, you can’t see that from the outside :]
I stick the safety pins in at an angle so they don’t puncture the smooth face of the foam on the opposite side.
With the rest of it pinned together you can glue individual overlapping pieces together!
I used HOT GLUE :]
(don’t burn yourself)
assembled and glued leg
I used the same process for all of my pieces of armor. I will update this blog with pictures of all the pieces once I take them :]
To finish the armor you need to do at least two layers of MOD PODGE. This seals the foam.
*Make the coats even and try and keep the grain of your strokes flowing in the same direction.
After you have let the MOD PODGE dry (this should take a day) you may spray paint.
We used several automotive spray paints. Make sure you do the painting several days before your event if you happen to be cutting it down to the wire. The paint needs time to fully dry, and it will smell very strong for at least a full day.
JUMPSUIT SECTION
The jumpsuits of this costume are what truly drove me insane. I have basic sewing skills, but I bit off more than I could chew.
Through my screen-caps of this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V1PwpoDqzM
I discovered that the ghost uniforms, or jumpsuits, are made of two materials. The center of the jumpsuit is made of a smooth white material (some future Kevlar most likely) which I decided to re-create with spandex. The side of her body and part of her arm is made of something that, to me, looks a lot like sports mesh (probably some sort of ultra light, moisture wicking space cloth). So I decided to make my jumpsuit out of white spandex and white sports mesh.
I didn’t want my white jumpsuit to be see-through, so I bought a cheap, thin, white spandex to line it with.
*Note: Using three different fabrics in a jumpsuit is hard. I don’t recommend it. You have to work with three different kinds of elasticity. I’m sure if I was a better seamstress I would have known what to do and what not to do, but I am not a better seamstress.
PATTERN MAKING!!!!!
If you don’t have a pre-made pattern for your psychic espionage special-ops uniform you might have to do it my way.
YOU GET TO MAKE A FULL BODY MANNEQUIN OF YOURSELF!!!
Start by putting on a t-shirt and sweatpants that you don’t really want.
*We used tights instead of sweatpants and it was painful
Then get your friends to wrap you up in duct tape! This part is really fun, and I’m sure you can find some friends to help.
You can see a completed hollow leg on the table.
After you cut your duct tape layer off, you should repair the sides with the cuts and stuff it with newspapers, old clothes, or anything you’d like.
Congratulations! You now have a full body mannequin of yourself!
To make patterns from it you should wrap it in newspaper, followed by masking tape. The newspaper layer is important so that you can get the pattern off of the mannequin.
Draw the lines on the mannequin where you want your seams and cut the newspaper/masking tape layer off.
Below is the pattern for my inner leg.
I put tracing/pattern paper over my masking tape cut out and traced it.
VOILA! I had a real pattern to cut my fabric out!
*I even traced this one again so if I messed up my original pattern would not be ruined.
I used this same process to make the rest of the jumpsuit.
This was the pattern for the center and pelvic pieces of my jumpsuit. I was about to cut it out of the lining.
*Cutting out the lining first was helpful because I was able to pin it together into an estimate of what the final jumpsuit would look like. This let me know I was on the right track.
WARNING:RANT AHEAD (skip to the next headline to continue instruction)
I realized I am writing this as if the whole time I knew what I was doing…
Let me dispel that thought from your mind immediately: The pattern you see above (even the leg pattern) took me, I’m gonna say… weeks to finally be satisfied with. Some nights we would schedule costuming time, and as Mark dremeled and sketched, I sat there staring at a single picture. Sometimes I would sit and focus on a single item all night. Mark couldn’t understand why I wasn’t working. The truth was, I had NO IDEA what I was doing. I didn’t know where to start, or if I could even do it. I would sit in extreme anxiety, rotating a sketch on the ground. When I worked by myself I would do the same thing. Even after we discovered the masking tape method I sketched about 10 different versions of my seams on the mannequin.
I don’t even remember half of the methods I tried to make a jumpsuit… I just remember that this is what my nights looks like:
Try to visualize jumpsuit-do some pinning and stretching- eat some cookie dough to neutralize frustration- play some starcraft- focus on jumpsuit again- rinse and repeat…
I had most of the pattern and lining figured out when this picture was taken in February. I began trying to sew the sports mesh and spandex to the lining in March. The process was disheartening to say the least. I had a gos se (狗屎・狗屎) sewing machine that would jam up, no exaggeration, every 5 minutes! Before you tell me my tension was off, trust me, I consulted with several more weathered seamstresses and even had it looked at. There was a problem with the metal cover of the bobbin. Aaaaannnnnyway, It was nightmarish to work with. Every time it jammed I had to stop sewing, remove the rats nest of thread it had created, open the bottom latch, untangle what was inside, remove the casing, remove the bobbin, pull the thread through the bobbin casing again, replace the bobbin and casing into the machine, close it up, and start where I had stopped. I often had to do some seam ripping as well to get rid of what the jam had done. Imagine sewing peacefully and then *gurrnnnttttt* goes the machine, the needle stops, and you know what you have to do, EVERY FIVE MINUTES. I would inhale deeply, close my eyes, and try my hardest not to hurl the machine across the room and into the wall. It would have smashed beautifully being such a cheap plastic.
Oh, also, I’m a procrastinator. So most of this was happening in April, one night before Star Fest (the convention these were for). After pulling two straight all-nighters and dragging a friends machine to the convention with me they still weren’t done. The night before the contest I sat sewing in the darkened hotel room trying to pipe the EL wires into the seams. Needless to say when Mark arrived in the morning and I was still sewing he had me stop, and sleep. We went as make shift apocalyptic whatevers that year. Haha.
END RANT (but maybe not complaints)
JUMPSUIT CONTINUED
I finished the jumpsuit in July 2011. To refresh your memory that is ten months from their conception month in September 2010.
I used a clear netting to pipe the EL wire into the seams of my jumpsuit.
I sincerely apologize for the quality of my phone pictures.
This is the netting around the EL wire.
I stole these next two perfect diagrams for piping from sew4home.com.
Pretend the orange and yellow star-burst fabric is the clear netting, and pretend the piping cord is EL wire!
Once you have folded the netting over the EL wire you can sew it to itself.
*It helps to pin it to itself first
*I ended up having an easier time leaving the netting loose around the wire as I piped it between the seams. (By the way, if you have any more questions about how to pipe things into seams just leave me a comment and I promise I’ll respond :] I’ll try to be helpful)
Piping is done easiest with a zipper foot attachment on your sewing machine.
This is what it looks like when you are sewing it. (you can also imagine sewing the two other fabrics to it this way)
You want to get the stitching as close to the wire as possible. Don’t overdo it and let the needle touch the EL wire, that’s too close.
If you pipe it in correctly it will lay flat to the fabric, almost as if you’d glued it on.
This is mine!
Fabricator Mark will have to talk about the electronics of the EL wire as I far from comprehending it.
This is what the piped RED EL wire looks like on the Spectre suit:
It looks a little squiggly here, but if you just pulled it taught it straightened out.
We kept or hip pads and shoulder pads on with very fine heavy duty Velcro after discovering that hooks don’t do the trick. (We discovered this at San Diego Comic Con July 2011 as pieces of our costume kept falling off)
All of the lights worked, but for some reason we never thought to get a picture of the suits in the dark 
Proof:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7w8dNe71Euo&feature=g-upl
Oh well. At Comic Con we have a few pictures of some of the armor lights working.
SEE THE ARM AND SHOULDER!
Do you know how I managed to keep that cold stare for every photo at Comic Con? My entire jumpsuit was full of hard plastic soldering connections and wires. All of these were kept tight to my skin rubbing me for hours. We believe I was also receiving electric shocks periodically.
This was right before Mark and I were interviewed on G4. :]
We learned SO MUCH from these costumes. They were an incredibly difficult first real costume to attempt, but we gained so many new skills. Everything we’ve done since has seemed incredibly simple. We struggled, and at times I personally thought it might be best to just give up, but I am so glad I wasn’t given that option!
However I have considered setting mine on fire for a cathartic release.
Let me know if you have any questions at all. I would love to answer them :]
SPACE VANITY SHOT (cause as much as I complain about how they turned out, we are still a little proud)
-Fabricator Lily
Thanks to:
-Kenyon, Nate. StarCraft: Ghost–Spectres. New York: Pocket Star Books, 2011. Print.
-Sew4home.com
-google images (ha)
-Fabricator Mark
-Ian Kisluk (for the gun and mask)
-My family
-Beppi and Nina for their working sewing machines
-My Mom for teaching me almost everything I know and guiding me patiently though every obstacle
-and Toll House Cookie Dough
Real Fabrication 