Ahoy!

We’re only a few weeks away from Talk Like a Pirate Day, on September 19th, and that means you don’t have much time to learn how to…well, talk like a pirate.

These two videos will help you master pirate lingo in a jiffy so you don’t embarrass yourself needlessly in the face of a world wide cultural phenomenon. No pressure there.

The first video was, in fact, made by the founders of Talk Like a Pirate Day so you know you can trust them. The second video is a little iffy. I mean, the guy looks too clean cut to be teachin’ ye how to talk all pirate-ty.

Either way, these short tutorials will help you pass as pirate material so ye aren’t forced to take a walk off the auld plank! (I watched both videos and I’m talkin’ like a pirate already. You can’t place enough value on a YouTube education!)

Check back soon for more information on Talk Like a Pirate Day, including my own pirate costume and prop photos.

We’ve been blogging quite a bit about Dr. Horrible, the supervillain musical that’s taken the Internet by storm.

Today, we’ll take a closer look at making a Dr. Horrible costume.

Lab Coat

Dr. Horrible wears a white lab coat. You can find a basic lab coat at any costume shop, but if you want to be picky you’ll need a coat that buttons on the side, not down in front. Look for the “Howie” style coat.

Here are some places that sell this type of lab coat:

http://www.dmdevice.com/A001.html
http://www.bocsafetyproducts.co.uk
http://www.jamstore.co.uk

Logo on Pocket

The Dr. Horrible logo is a caduceus, which is a winged herald’s staff entwined by two serpents in the form of a double helix.

The serpents are green and the staff is red.

Goggles

The evil doctor wears a pair of welding goggles. The style is VG800H5 made by Fibre-Metal, available at the following stores:

http://www.discountsafetygear.com
http://www.mortonsafety.com
http://www.toolking.com
http://store.weldingdepot.com
http://www.amazon.com

EDIT: Word on the street is that these goggles actually are green in color. Apparently, the manufacturer picture is wrong and they are NOT silver as shown.

White Gloves

Dr. Horrible wears a pair of white work gloves. Some people have found that fencing gloves work, too. You can try these stores:

http://store.weldersource.com
http://www.tcafencing.com

White Boots

Complete your outfit with a pair of white boots, and you’re all set. They can be found at the following stores:

http://www.mortonsafety.com
http://www.acehardwareoutlet.com

This recent Comic-Con attendee came pretty close:

I hope we see a bunch of Dr. Horrible costumes this Halloween. Be sure to practice your evil laugh!

If you haven’t seen Dr. Horrible yet, head on over to drhorrible.com or purchase the show directly from iTunes.

Sometimes, a costume is more than just the clothes you wear. Sometimes, a costume is less than just the clothes you wear.

Makeup is something we haven’t talked too much about around here. That’s because makeup is usually an accessory to the costume, something that finishes the costume to make it more complete. It’s not often that a costume is defined by the makeup alone—but sometimes, it can be.

The brilliance behind zombie costumes is that you can wear whatever you want—or just whatever you normally wear. If you had really turned into a zombie, that’s what you would be wearing. As far as costumes go, it’s about as simple as it comes. It’s the makeup that’s really the costume.

To be a zombie, you’ll need pallid, sickly-looking skin. Maybe with a bit of a greenish tint to it. You’ll need at least one wound—that’s the zombie bite that turned you. And if you want to be really dramatic, blood splatters are the way to go.

Fake blood can be easily made by mixing corn syrup with red food coloring. Adding a little cocoa powder to the concoction will give it a darker blood color and ensure that when it dries, it will look just like dried blood.

Making your wounds takes a little more work, but it’s so much more fun. There are plenty of recipes for this kind of thing. I’ve done it with cotton balls and gelatin. I have a friend who made amazing realistic-looking zombie wounds with marshmallows. You can experiment with other textures too, like tissue or corn flakes. The wounds can be glued on with latex (the kind they use in theater to attach fake beards and the like), and painted with makeup and fake blood.

You don’t have to wait until Halloween to do this, either. Grab some friends and make a fast and fun zombie film. Or better yet, participate in one of the many zombie walks that occur every year across the country! Zombiewalk.com is a good resource for finding one, or organize your own in your neighborhood.

This is a fun video made by costume guru Shada. She’s working on a Sith costume and is documenting her progress with a video camera!

Here’s Part One of her costume journey:

Great work! Very fun to watch.

Having been deemed as the writer with the most costuming experience, I am here to share with you–

A Short History of My Own Costuming Experience.

Part Two: College

The next few years saw a little improvement in my costume-making skills. Of the sewing I did at this time, my creation efforts were mostly redirected to making normal clothing, and I only made three real costumes during my years of college. One was a cosplay of Victoria Everglot from Corpse Bride, one was a Queen of Spades costume, and the other was a new, more awesome pirate costume.

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Here are some amazing costumes made from duct tape! And yes, we’ve blogged about duct tape costumes before.

These particular costumes are modeled after the characters Mal and Kaylee from the TV show Firefly. In one of the episodes, Mal and Kaylee go to a fancy shindig all dressed up. It’s remarkable that a costume made from duct tape could look so similar.

The costumes’ creator posts about his efforts on Fireflyfans.net.

I decided to enter the “Stuck at Prom” contest sponsored by the company that makes Duck Tape. In this contest, high school students from all over the country create prom outfits using duct tape. Ten finalists are selected from all of the entries, and online voting determines the winner. To demonstrate my devotion to Firefly, I created my duct tape ensemble inspired by Mal’s tux and Kaylee’s dress from Shindig. These outfits made it into the top ten.

I used over 20 rolls of duct tape, and had to overcome laws of physics (all those ruffles are heavy!) as well as wear the outfit in Phoenix summer temperatures exceeding 107 degrees.

Wow, great job! I hope you win.

You can see all of the Top Ten finalists at stuckatprom.com.

UPDATE: Watch the video HERE.

Remember these guys from Sesame Street? Yip yip yip yip…

Well, thanks to Instructables.com, you can learn how to make your own Yip Yip alien costume! They offer a step by step guide using fleece, sponges and mesh. Looks great!

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BugsandFishes is a top-notch maker who blogs daily about her crafts and creations.

She’s just published some photos of her new felt masks and disguises. They look great!

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Do you want an original costume that can’t be purchased, but you don’t know how to sew? Or perhaps you need a crazy prop for your costume and you just can’t find anything like it in stores. I went to CONduit in Salt Lake City on Saturday, and there I attended a panel that was all about turning ordinary, random things into costume items, to create items that no one else has!

There are two basic tricks to making a costume item out of something else:

The first is to break down the idea of your finished product into components. You won’t be able to find the exact thing you need, but you will be able to find various things that you can put together to make what you need. Your costume is a puzzle, and you’re looking for the pieces.

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Indy Mogul has a wonderful demonstration of how to make a giant sandwich costume. It looks great and it was made on a $40 budget.

Check out THEIR ARTICLE and watch the video below.

Very fun and impressive!

I was late to the Twitter party. I also don’t do much photography, so Flickr was always out of the question. I’ve been on Facebook for awhile now, but haven’t used it for its costume powers. You might say I’m a tad old school. Funny, since I proud myself on my unbearably geeky nature that seems to have no end.

I’ve come to the light, however, and have seen the future of costume fans across the globe. The web has grown up a lot and is always giving out more tools to keep people together. With more and more collective genius mixing into the pool with the social revolution, it’s without hesitation that any costume fan can immediately jump into the mix.

So here’s our mash up of web tools that will put your disguise on the map and open the floodgates of costume fan goodness to you.

Tools To Get You Known

Flickr is the ideal photo sharing website. Why? Well it just is. It’s clean, easy to use, attractive, and a repository for all images that are interesting. There are so many widgets and tools developed around Flickr that you can even add your Flickr album to your blog. Flickr is all about empowering the user to get their photos out and across the web.

Hit the jump for more of our ideas…

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Instructables has always been a knock out for good DIY content. Without enough time to scour the pages frequently enough, I don’t see everything. Upon loading up the front page today, I came across this instructable on how to make an effective and convincing gunshot wound. It’s pretty sick looking, and not for the faint of heart, but if you’re making your own costumes it’s a must.

Since Instructables is always good for a step-by-step tutorial, you can check it out and plan out your costumes accordingly. Instructables user, Trumpetneel, seems to have a knack for these discusting flesh lacerations and wounds, so he’ll have more for you when you check it out. Now, to figure out how I’m going to manage breakfast…

Well it’s been a few great months blogging for MyDisguises. There’s a lot to talk about. So many people have come and gone, and the visits are well into the tens of thousands. Some stay for a long time, others just flash on in for a quick peek. Either way, we plan to bring you great content for a long time. Here are a few things we like to tell the new visitors to help them get the most of the blog. This is always a learning process for us, so we hope to streamline the experience.

These three tips are a great way to get more than you ever thought you could out of MyDisguises…

Subscribe to our RSS feed - I know this sounds selfish, sure we want you to read it all. But there’s more behind it. The RSS subscription capabilities will make life easier for you and let you get MyDisguises on demand. We previously did a post about RSS feeds so check it out here if you want to know more.

Leave comments to get the conversations going - Some of our readers have agreed with us, while others find the things we say contrary to their opinions. That’s okay! We encourage discussion and commentary. Once you click on any of our posts, you’ll find a place to leave your 2 cents at the bottom. Go for it, by all means. There aren’t a lot of places online where you can just stew over all things costume related, so MyDisguises is a wonderful start.

Submit news and ideas to the blog - We don’t claim to know everything but are always on the prowl for news, ideas, musings, instructions, and anything else you may have to share. I’ll be putting our email in a more prominent spot where you can contact us. If you have something you want to get out there, shoot it to our email and we’ll be sure you’re published!

Hopefully those three things will keep you up to date, in the conversation, and always informed on all things good with costumes. Let us know if you have any other great ideas.

 If you’re anything like I was as a child, discovering the true identity of Santa Claus was upsetting. I’ll never forget when my mother asked me to get something from her room and finding wrapped gifts adressed to me from Santa. Right there I knew that either Santa had a new business model and was delivering gifts early, or he simply wasn’t who I thought he was.There is just no reason to let the mystery of Santa Claus fade for the children. Therefore, we’ve worked up a guide on how to pull off the Santa effect so well your children will secretly wonder in their adult years whether the man in red actually came to visit that special Christmas day.

Pre-Planning: Scapegoats and Stories

Every family has their own way of portraying Santa Claus. The build up before Christmas is so big for most children, they are easily spellbound by all things related to the 25th. It’s in these critical few days that you can prepare and psyche out the kids for an epic Santa visit. Here are some suggestions:

• First, have your scapegoats ready - Since you’re going to be Santa, your kids may notice you’re not around when the old man shows up. Tell them you had to go take back a broken gift to the store where you bought it. Maybe you can tell them that you’re off to buy something for your wife and the store is staying open late on Christmas Eve. You could also try a more classic approach. There’s an emergency at the office and you had to go fix something late at night. They’ll believe it.
• Develop your own story - Later on we’ll talk about how to simulate a sleigh landing. If your Santa visit is going to be different than normal, develop a story around it. Some houses and neighborhoods don’t have the traditional roof and chimney capabilities. Although we’re offering suggestions for a more typical home, make plans to custom tailor your ideas for your environment.

Step One: Costume

Your costume is going to be one of your biggest selling points. Take care to go for authenticity. Remember, you can use this year after year, donate the goods for an event, or even resell them when the kids get older. It may cost a few extra bucks, but with pictures and memories, it will be more than worth it.

• Simulate a real beard - Go for a beard with a slightly natural gray tint. Some cheaper Santa beards are made of cotton and don’t look right. Better beards also come with matching wigs.
• The suit is key - Color is also pretty important in this option. Try for a suit with a deeper red, not the bright glowy red that you sometimes get. Some Santas go without the big black boots, which could be trouble.
• To hat or not to hat? - You can go sans hat if you like, but your santa wig has to be on point. You’ll want to accessorize a bit to compensate.

Step 2: Accessories

All too often, it’s the details that make the suit work wonders.

• Santa glasses  - Santa is a wise man. How else would he be able to build that all knowing naughty or nice list? Find some nice wiry glasses that look more like reading glasses. Hang them low on your nose.
• Rosy cheeks and nose - Yeah, you’re going to have to wear some make up. Bug your wife for some blush that she may have laying around and blend it liberally over your cheeks and nose. You want to look jolly, so you gotta do it.
• Naughty or Nice list - Get some paper and apply a weathered look to it. If you are good with calligraphy, this could be a benefit. Make up a rolled, scroll-like sheet of paper with names on it. You can have it peeking out of your pocket. You are going to try to get caught by the children, so they’ll have a chance to see it. You can also have the list “accidentally” fall out of your pocket right by where they leave you cookies. Check out this WikiHow on making paper look old.

Step 3: Effects and Aftermath

It’s not enough just to look like Santa, you have to be him.  The kids are staying up and waiting to hear something. For these parts, you’ll need some orchestrating so they don’t catch you. Older children who are a bit more “skeptical” can always be a big help in this part.

• Racket on the Roof - Here’s a great way to simulate a rooftop landing. Get a couple of brooms or mops. Grab your wife and tie some bells around your arms. Once you hit the roof, start walking and tapping the brooms. As your arms shake, it will simulate sleigh bells. With 2 sets of feet and potentially 4 brooms, it could almost sound like reindeer pounding around on the roof.
• Ho, Ho, Ho… on tape - If you don’t have the deep voicebox for a santa voice, get a recording. Play it loud enough so the kids can hear a faint sound of the old man.
• Santa treats left behind - A cool trick to simulate Santa on the roof is to throw candy canes, Christmas confetti, gumdrops, etc. off the side of the roof. In the morning you can take the kids outside. Tell them that it must have been treats that fell off of Santa’s sleigh. They’ll be spellbound.

Whatever you decide to do, do it with style. It will be extra work, but you don’t want your kids to stop believeing too early. This will keep them curious for a long time.

What are some of your ideas? Let us know in the comments section. With the right amount of creativity, you can have a Christmas experience never to be forgotten.

Instructables is always a veritable treasure trove of awesome stuff. I love the clever crafts that people come up with and share. Some of them, I’ve nearly stood up from my computer and pursued crafting immediately.

That’s why I have to share the Living Severed Hand instructable with the bloggees today (does that word work?). This particular craft may seem a bit late for Halloween, but it’s fun anyway. The user who crafted this goes by the name a grain of alt.

The basic gist of this is to get a matching pair of gloves but create one as a stuffed “dummy glove” to slip the hand into. If the glove is stuffed well, and attached properly, all you need is to make a semi-realistic looking stub and you’re set. However, if you’re running around with your fingers wiggling on the severed hand, we have confidence people won’t be looking at your stub so much as they will be running from it. Either way, it’s a pretty ingenious costume piece and deserves a good try.

Good Work!

Normally I would hesitate to link an article that’s linking another site whom is also linking from another site, but I owe the credit of finding this to BoingBoing (But nice find for Neatorama and great job to Instructables for originating this).

For today’s DIY contribution, Instructables brings us the method of creating your very own Ghostbusters zapper backpack. Good because buying a fake one is a bad idea and usually looks like a cheap toy. Bad because you’ll likely become hugely obsessed with the coolness factor. According to Honus (username of the creator on Instructables):

The packs and trap are pretty movie accurate- they were made from plans that were drawn up from one of the original movie “hero” packs on display at Planet Hollywood. The A.L.I.C.E. pack frames are the same as the movie and were purchased from an Army surplus store. Most of the small parts on the pack are movie accurate and were located at a local electronics surplus store. Even our coveralls were from the original movie supplier. The “no ghost” patches were bought online.

 Hit the link if you want to see more. It’s worth your time for sure.

Link (via Instructables)

Thanks Honus!

So maybe my personal life experiences influence this blog a tad much. I can’t help it, I’ve lived a rich one.

My father used to be a rock deejay. In fact, to this day he can be heard rolling in the driveway of our house thumping some out-of-date rock music. Despite the fact that he’s a fairly conservative and general person, he has a deep love for all things rock. As you can guess, I inherited this passion. It started with me peering at his classic record collection, progressed to thieving his Beatles CDs, and ended up in a full fledged 450 eclectic CD collection before MP3’s hit the Internet. I was proudly walking in my father’s footsteps.

This is a brief time line of what my childhood looked like.

12 Years - I discover that there’s more than Depeche Mode and the Cure. I buy my first CDs, comprising Weezer, Green Day, Collective Soul, The Adam Sandler CD, and (oddly enough) ABBA Gold. Yeah, I was a open-minded fledgling rocker. I could be found rocking out in front of the mirror.

13 Years - I get a Peavey Predator and start mashing chords to Soundgarden’s “Fell on Black Days”. A bit of facial hair is coming in and I’m feeling ready for the stage. You find me rocking out in front of the mirror, but this time with a real guitar.

14 Years - I get too cool for my parents, but secretly love that my Dad is a rocker still. I explore classic rock some more. I also get an acoustic guitar. It was an Ovation round back. Hard to hold, but sounds sooo epic. I explore the classics of the acoustic guitar, includipng but not limited to “Dust in the Wind”. I’m getting good. You find me rocking out in front of the mirror, with my own guitar, and attempting my “dirty rocker” vocals. That didn’t work out so much.

15 Years - I take a break from my axes to explore some more of what we call, “the ladies”. You can find me fixing my hair and popping pimples in front of my mirror. My guitar is sitting on its stand. I’m listening to just about any rock that hits my stereo.

16 Years - These are the days I’m getting into other types of music, involved in school leadership, and forgetting my rock roots. Dark times indeed. You can find me in front of mirror rapping to my new 2Pac CD. The rock gods retreat from my abode.

17 Years - A harsh break up wrecks my world, so I go where all rockers end up. I pick up my guitars and start writing more. I pour my love life out into the music. This is before emo though so don’t even go there. Even the greatest song writers write about this stuff. You can find me in front of my mirror singing songs that don’t exist anywhere but in my head. They inevitably suck, or at least to me.

18 Years - I move to college. I discover the art of being cool because I play the guitar. Girls do too. I have to make the moral decision of doing it for the music, or selling out. After a long bout with rocker’s identity crisis (heretofore referred to as RIC), I decide that it’s about the music. You can find me once again, back where I was when I started. I’m playing my guitar in my room alone, mashing chords to the music that brought me to the guitar in the first place. Radiohead, Smashing Pumpkins, Led Zeppelin, and the rest of the guys.

Okay, so what’s the point?

Well, as an intro to this first DIY bonanza, I’m going to teach you how to dress like a rock star. That’s right. We’re going to attack the major rocker looks, and what you need to make them authentic. I can’t possibly cover all of them, as there are so many. But the core looks are accessible and effective in their delivery. By equipping you with the right tools, no one will even know you’re in costume. They’ll just think you’ve taken on a whole new look.

So, for this part 1, I can only go so far as to prepare you for our first costume in the next segment.

Step 1 - Men, get over the makeup problem. That’s right, you’re gonna wear makeup. When you’re on stage, melting faces with a heavy solo mashed up on the tiny frets, you need the glitter to reflect. Essential makeup is as follows, but specific to certain types:

• Massive glitter - Glam and Butt rockers
• Eye makeup - Goth, Glam, and Butt Rockers… sometimes Brit rockers, but must be used WISELY
• Blush - Not to make your cheeks rosy, but to high light parts. Specifically Glam Rockers
• Face Paints - If you’re going all out, you may want to totally paint your face. Goth and Emo rockers will use this for the token “tear” or other sadness conveying effect.

Step 2 - Also for the men, you may have to go bare chested. I don’t mean shirt off, but I do mean that you may need to shave/wax that primal man fur. The long hair, leather pants, no shirt combo are so Zeppelin that it’s not even funny. If you do sport the hair, it must be a small diamond shaped tuft in between your necessarily undersized pectorals. The more ribs the better.

Step 3 - The right clothes. This is more specific to the type of rocker as well. We’ll go into more detail with this later. Just don’t forget the importance of looking right for the part. Some ideas:

• Brit Rocker - Unkempt suit, potential fedora, thick framed glasses, loose tie
• Glam Rocker - Tight, shiny, plasticy clothes open at every possible appropriate place.
• Classic Rocker - American or British flag themes, tight jeans. Maybe the occasional backwards leotard but you’re not even being generic with that. That’s just straight up Freddy Mercury.
• Goth Rocker - Everything in black. Long, draping, menacing clothes. Metal items and accessories with various spikes or chains. Don’t look like a monster though, it’s not about that.

Step 4 - Accessorize! You can’t just go in with the outfit. You need something with you to show you are serious about your role. Whether it’s the token cigarette dangling loosely between your fingers or stuck to your lip, or whether it means having your axe strapped around your back. Don’t let it leave your side. You’re about the music and the fans, remember?

Step 5 - Have a token “move”. I always imagined myself having a specific thing that I did on stage if I was a rocker. I’m actually a pretty normally dressed, conservative guy. But if I managed to take on a stage persona, I’d probably lick my guitar neck from the bottom to the top while sawing whiney solos into the frets with awesomeness. This part of your costume is free, but necessary.

Well, in the second segment I’ll explore how to dress like a Brit Rocker. I’ll bring you images and examples of what you need. In the meantime go play some of “Tommy” and light a candle. You’ll see your entire future.

I’ve never been a DIY type, but I thought that for this blog specifically, we’d try our hand at some real good DIY costumes and see how they go. I don’t have much I can do for now since I don’t have any materials to make anything with. But, in the meantime it’s my goal to pull the focus of the “do it yourself” types into Second Skin and see just what they think.

The new segment will be focused on clever costume ideas, people who are into them, and potentially feature some fun videos and photos of the costumes in the making. I’ll be enlisting the help of people all around me to see if we can’t document some of the most creative costume creations out there. Maybe, just maybe, we’ll get some hits for it.

In light of this new focus to add to the blog, I thought I’d make a post with our first DIY feature. I’m not making anything here myself, but with the magic of the Interwebs I’ll bring you the best of the best in home-brewed ideas to supplement your excuse for dressing up, or down for that matter.

Gearing up for DIY time

If you’re going to make your own stuff you need to prepare. That’s our focus today. There are a few things to know if you wanna DIY your own costume. Here are the basic ideal steps to get DIY ready.

• Idea - Come up with an idea for the costume you want to create. This is self explanatory, so I’ll leave it at that.
• Mock it up! - I’m no artist, so I like to pull images from the Internet to convey my message to myself. Once I have a visual, I can work with it. There are some great sites out there too.
• Get the tools - Find what you need once you have a plan and buy it all at once. You don’t want to interrupt the creative process. This could be anything from glue guns, spray paints, beads, sewing gear, and of course fabrics or whatever.
• Document it and put it online! - This is an important step. If you get pics or videos of it, put it online and you’ll see that there are tons of people who are interested in what you have to show. I’d like to think that there would be a way to get paid for your genius, but I don’t know if anyone has come up with that plan.

So that should get you started. Come to think of it, we’ll be doing segments highlighting a lot of home brewed stuff just to keep it fresh here. You deserve the spotlight of a rock star, so send us what you have and we’ll attach it to a unique post and give you the hard earned attention you deserve!

We’ll be back soon with more DIY content, so stay tuned.