Cain Nightlord from Trinity Blood

This is my masterpiece. This is the most difficult and detailed costume I've ever made and I'll ever be doing. After 5 years of planning and 5 months of work, it's finished.

The story: When my 100th cosplay was nearing in 2007, I wanted to do something special, something I had never done before. I usually prefer the more comfortable and thus easier cosplays, but for this special occassion, I was searching for something spectacular. And what is more spectacular than the Trinity Blood artworks?

And so I fell in love with Cain. He's a captivating character with an absolutely unique and glorious design. I couldn't resist.

I bought a lot of the things I'd need for the costume, yet I never started it for real. I was just plain over-challenged, I didn't know enough about materials and how to solve all the riddles this outfit confronted me with.

Now, a few years later, I have learned a lot and accepted the challenge. I started with the armour and wings part because sewing will be easy compared to this.

I started with shaping the frame for the six wings out of various wires and glued hundreds of swan and goose feathers onto it (I only used big feathers). Then I started the sun wheel by using thick flower arrangement wire constructions, hot glue, hard foam and modelling plastics, shaping the spear ends and constructing the spheres (Ravenic helped me here).

The shoulder armour parts (3x2 parts) were a lot of work. I shaped them from hard foam, coated them with liquid plastic, applied the relief shapes with foam rubber and window colours in a lot of steps and coated them again with liquid plastic. I also cut hundreds of little triangular spear-like shapes for the collars and sleeves, the cuff armours and other details from hard foam, shaped the three-dimensional parts with modelling clay (the small parts killed me, they were just so many), coated everything again with liquid plastic and went to the next step.

I wanted it all to be as detailed as possible. That means that every armour part had to be decorated all over with tiny reliefs (all parts of shoulder armour, the six spines hanging from the back armour, sleeve armours, pendants and talismans, etc.). So I applied them with window colour, on every single piece. It took ages, but it worked out.

I made all the pendants and talismans on his belt from rubber foam, modelling clay and window colour and threaded all the pearl chains on his belt according to the original (it wasn't easy to find all fitting pearls), then coated everything with liquid plastic, again.

After the raw parts were done, the next step was to be done: gilding the armour.

I was sure from the start that normal golden paint wouldn't do for this cosplay, it was just not brilliant enough. So I coated the whole armour and belts in 24 carat gold.

Gilding requires three steps: First the lay milk has to be applied, afterwards the gold leaves and in the end it all has to be coated with a sealing finish. When everything had dried, I used precious metal paints to emphasize the relief structures.

The back armour is constructed from various gilded plates and armour parts, the six wings, the sun wheel and the goat skull (mine is an antilope skull because a goat wasn't big enough in my eyes).

The coat and the overcoat were made from 20 meters of bridal satin. It's incredibly heavy and the double collar always tries to choke me. I added hundreds of small application stones, combined two wigs into one for his crazy hair and gilded the boot armour. Overall I used 500 leaves of gold.

And now I'm done, even one month before Connichi saturday when I intend to wear Cain.

Please enjoy. It's the top of what I'm able to do, I can't offer more than this.

Cosplayer: NanjoKoji

September 3, 2012