Hello everyone!
I've been a huge MonHun fan for close to 10 years now and, while I plan to eventually cosplay some of the established characters like the Ace Commander from MH4U, the idea to cosplay my own character has been growing on me over the years. I'll get back to this soon but first I just wanna explain a bit about Monster Hunter if anyone is unfamiliar with this game franchise. Monster Hunter games are known for having a character creation process where you get to choose how the player character, also known as the protagonist or simply "hunter", looks.
Anyways, over the years I've played several installments of the series (sinking thousands of hours into the games) but I don't think anything had such a strong impact on me as the first time I started up MonHun World on PS4 back on 9th August 2018. One needs to know here that World was my first PS4 game and I did the jump directly from PS2 to PS4 so the upgrade in graphics etc was insanely noticeable. I remember the first time I saw my own character in the first cutscenes onboard that ship that gets wrecked by Zorah Magdaros emerging from the sea and later when you explore the Ancient Forest for the first time. I was floored, couldn't believe what I was seeing! I was absolutely blown away and I've been glued to my PS4 ever since.
Character creator view of my MHW hunter. |
Oh well, it wasn't until sometime in 2021 that something happened. My player character on World, whom I had named Vindulf for no particular reason, suddenly became more than just a mute self-insert through which I experienced the game. I was coaxed into roleplaying one day with a friend online, I didn't think much of it (I enjoy roleplaying in general) at first. But that roleplay just kept growing and growing. As a result Vindulf slowly evolved to get a distinct personality, a deep background story that stretched outside the bounds of the established storyline in World and so on and so on...
This character ended up becoming so much more to me than just pixels in a game.
And that's when I realized that I really want to cosplay him one day. Maybe a few years from now on (yes, I'm early with this post) because truth be told I have not even decided yet on what armor or weapon I want to make for this cosplay, possibly a mixed set or one of those event layered armors.
The reason I'm doing this makeup test now is because I happened to have fitting colored lenses lying around and figured yolo! No but really, this is mostly just for fun and for overall practice and well, kind of to give myself a general idea on what I gotta work on more. It could be a lot better but I need to invest into nicer makeup brushes (I have some cheapo ones from eBay that lowkey suck lolol) etc as I've been using the same shit for years and I sometimes feel like it's time to expand and maybe invest more into quality brands... I've been holding off on doing it though cuz whenever I try to do research I get so overwhelmed. ;_;
Oh and yeah, I did the scars very hastily (just eyeshadow and eyeliner combo #lazyaf) although I know I have Rigid Collodion lying around somewhere unless it dried up after these 10 years but yeah, didn't really have time to go looking for it with the sun going down and all.
The wig is borrowed and it's way off in both color and style (I definitely want a lacefront for the real thing) but it was the closest I could get my hands on, in a hurry, as I literally don't own a single wavy wig myself.
I obviously don't have the typical MonHun undies either so I just had to take something random from my wardrobe that is as inconspicuous as possible lol. I'm leaning towards making an Insect Glaive (already have a Hunting Horn made for another MonHun cosplay) but I'm not sure yet, it's either that or Dual Blades. Probably the bug stick. And yes, I still play this game periodically, including the Iceborne Expansion.
This is probably going to be one of those "half eternity" projects, that I'm gonna work on very slowly, so don't expect any proper updates or progress in at least a year as I'm hopefully gonna try to wrap up some unfinished projects out of the way first. But this one will happen, that's for sure.
And that's it for the first post of the year, thanks for reading!
Shiro Samurai out.