Cosplay breakdown: Odysseus - Hades 2
Welcome to a new little series I want to try and do! For upcoming and past cosplays, I’m going to talk through some of my initial thought processes, planning, and basically how I make some of the decisions I do for materials, build order, and difficulty level. Fair warning, it’s not always the most logical, but who needs sense when you have vibes.
We are starting with Odysseus from Hades 2. Apparently I can’t go past the human shade advisor to the protagonist with these games. So lets see what we are working with!
Hades designs are usually a single sprite, can’t be that complicated right? WRONG! There are so many layers to this, and of course I need to make it overly complicated.
When I’m looking at a design I have two main things I look for - layers and techniques/materials. For this, we ended up with it looking something like this:
Base - Linen: Blue skirt, ruffle, right sleeve atttached to a t-shirt, arm wraps
Armour - Leather: Tunic, metal plates?
Outer acessories - Linen: drape, then belt and armour undecided, maybe leather
Top layer - Linen: Cloak and scarf, leather: belt pouches, paper maps, final accessories
As you can see I get very technical with it. But this really helps me make it feel more manageable, and work out what order to do things in. I am attempting to learn from past sins, so planning attachment points and types from the get go is now a must.
I also try to make a note if I have patterns I can already use. In this case, the skirt I can pull from Daphne, the arm wraps from a pattern book I own, and the sleeve from witch Link. I also had a commercial dress pattern that should be simple to modify for the tunic, which means I don’t really need to get anything new.
Unlike Achilles, I want to bind for this one, largely because trying to alter the leather tunic/shoulder armour/belts situation to look good with a larger bust just feels like more effort than it’s worth. But that also means I need to have those base layers complete before I get started on the more fitted top pieces.
I decided on linen and leather because Aloy withdrawals. No but seriously I think the textures will be much nicer, I like to have some textural variation in my projects, and in keeping with what makes sense for the world he’s from. Was definitely a motivation for choosing him in the first place, getting a chance to work with my favourites again.
Some other techniques I want to try that are new are using foam basically like a potato stamp to create the fabric patterns, and doing thin metal sheeting for the plates on the tunic. I did something similar for my Lagertha bracers, but that was still bendable by hand, whereas I’d prefer if these were rigid, but didn’t require any special tools to do.
This was definitely a more simple one, it’s going to be a lot of layers that will require some finangling to sit nicely, but I’m excited! One last tip before we wrap up, as I was fabric shopping I was taking photos and putting my reference image in the same shot to see how things would look when I got pictures of the final result, because lets be real that’s a large part of cosplay fun. This was actually my fourth colour combo, how they looked in real life vs on the camera was quite different, so watch out for that. This isn’t exactly what I was originally picturing, but it looks good both ways so I’m happy with the balance. Time to build!
