Bard the Bowman impersonation cosplay costume, Luke Evans impersonation cosplay costume

This is me getting caught working on my costume in the living room. I was notified by my wife that I was "shedding" too much and needed to take myself outside. I would have said it was too cold outside if maybe I hadn't been wearing an entire elk hide at the time.

9 gojillion years later, I finished the arrows and quiver. I am currently coloring the bow string and will be ready for final pictures soon. This is a cardboard USPS mail tube covered with the leg of a pair of faux leather pants. I followed a tutorial on making medievil arrows from scratch. The arrow head is sculpey that was pretinted as metallic.

So, I am finally calling Bard completed. These newest poses include all the finished props and the newest makeup effects.

The prop build thread is located on therpf.com at https://www.therpf.com/forums/threads/bard-the-bowman-impersonation-cosplay-costume-the-hobbit-trilogy.345653/post-5472970 which covers the staining and weathering of the costume, the creation of the arrows, bow and quiver and little details about each step. Here, I want to focus on the makeup effects and staging.

I had intended for quite some time to lose weight and retake the final pose pictures. After a 20 pound loss, this went to full stop for a long time. I decided to work on the crazy idea of the comb over (comb forward) and found it can be done but is very time intensive. I have only successfully done it twice.

 The process starts with pulling the hair back and masking off the hairline intended. Then spraying extreme hold hairspray onto the skin. Wait for this to dry to tacky.


Pulling the hair up into a flat wall, I sprayed the area that would come in contact with the sprayed hairline already on the skin.



I then pulled the hair forward, carefully, and pressed the two tacky surfaces together, like the process used for contact adhesives.



I waited for this to dry and then I sprayed the same hairline from the top while, again, shielding the remainder of hair. I flipped the hair up along the top but separated out the hair that would lay straight back from the temples as does Bard's hair. I styled each accodingly as the top needed to be pulled up for full body but the sides were tight, straight back and intended to look tied back.

This created the entire additional hair coverage shown in the red circled area, aka, THE WORLD'S GREATEST COMB OVER!!!!


In the following, Luke Evans is pasted in on the right half of the photo for comparison:



I shaped the eyebrows, mustache and added brushed in makeup lines for faux hair in bare locations to match Luke's. The side chops were added after the above comparison photo as it was one of the things to strongly show as a remaining difference. All of the hair along the front is part of the comb forward, even on the sides. My hairline is fairly receded as shown in a previous picture, above.

 I used Plexiderm, a tip from Chris Ellerby, to eliminate my allergy eye bags. It works very well. I did not do my usual 3 day keto diet, a process that does an amazing job reducing face puffiness and making me look much slimmer.

My jawline was not a true fx fix but rather a long term use of mastiha resin gum, basically it is exercise gum:



After completing some outdoor poses, I returned to my hobby room where I have my photography stuff set up. I tried to take pictures with poses that were inspired by actual scene poses. Here are my final Bard the Bowman pictures ( more will be slowly added as I do background overlays with movie scenes). My rule, for myself, is no photoshopping me or my props, so all are real world effects. I will often borrow scene backgrounds from the movie and may change overall color tones to match the background lighting but no touchups or fixes on me or the costume.

This first one has just had my backdrop clipped out. This was a match pose to one of the posters before the film was released. I am most happy with how well the hand made arrows and sculpted dwarven arrowhead turned out.  



The following two are scene overlays. I posed purposely with the intent of cutting out my photo to overlay Luke Evans in scenes from the movie. This includes changing some lighting to match the scene tones.



All three were taken by me using my mouse on the floor to trigger the remote camera shutter.... with my foot.