I’ve gotten many questions about this, and it is actually not too complicated.
Keep in mind that I had to make the whole cosplay within a specificic time frame/deadline – so I made the wings in the way I thought would be easiest, and it actually worked to a certain point 😀
I’ve given a few pointers as to what I’d do differently if I were to do it again, at the bottom of the guide.

If you want to support my work you can do so on Patreon! Then I can push out more tutorials and cosplays more often! Link HERE!

Also a big shout out to Plastidip for giving me some cans for this project! Cosplay is an amazing art form and it is great that you guys noticed!

The whole construction is made out of EVA foam. Only thing you need to be careful about is getting the pieces to fit perfectly to each other. It is like a puzzle you could say, with a lot of measuring on beforehand.

Gems:

Made out of Transpa-Worbla with glass paint on the inside together with cellophane.
In my video – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4X7A2Vab938
You can see it come together quite nicely!
I also decided to use a worbla layer around the gems as it was more sturdy and it did not bulk up

Wings/Weapons:

Making the different pieces. The wings are somewhat complicated, and there wasn’t much available in the way of reference pictures that gave a clear view of the wings. I drew some rough sketches of the wings, measuring their length relative to Kai’sas height in the reference pictures, and found out how long they should be relative to my own height.

For example: I measured (in Photoshop) that Kai’sa was 12 cm tall, and that the top wing was 5.7 cm long. I am 170 cm tall, 12/170= 14.16, meaning that if I multiply the length of features from that image by 14.16, I find their length relative to my own body. 5.7*14.16=80.75, so the top wing should be 80.75 cm long in my costume. It is of course important to find an image, or screenshot a frame from a video, with such an angle that you see the components you’re interested in directly from the side – I used some frames from the music video.

I draw my sketches on the kind of rough paper that hardware stores sell to protect your floor while painting. You get these in fairly big rolls, and the paper is stiff enough to check whether your patterns will fit together. When I was happy with my sketches, I transfered them onto 5mm EVA foam, and cut them out.
I use contact glue to glue the pieces together, you will have to let it harden for about 10 min before putting the pieces together (read the instructions on the box 😀 the important part is to not mash the pieces together at once). The wings are glued together along the top bevels.
Everything is held together with contact glue, and hot glue where I needed small fixes. EVA foam is pretty light weight so it worked perfectly fine! You can hide the glue spots with even more EVA foam and then dremel it!

Priming and painting:

I primed it with 3 layers of Plasti-dip and one final layer of silver plasti dip for the Silver pieces. The gold pieces were painted with acrylics~
The blue part was quite interesting. I first added 3 layers of black plastidip, one layer of silver plastidip and then painted it with blue glass paint to get a blue shine. Also coated it with some purple on top to give it a dip-dye. Then I applied Plastidip’s chameleon spray on top of it to make it sparkle even more.

Harness:

I bolted an mdf plate onto the back of my vest (with large washers on the inside, so as to not tear the fake leather fabric), with grips to receive the hooks I planned to add on the plate holding the wings. Then I made another plate and added hooks on it so I could just attach it easily to the back plate.
Then I made 2 diagonal wooden holders (think flag pole holders, and see the bottom image) and drilled holes in them, so they could accept the 2 PVC pipes that hold the wings. The wooden pole holders were screwed onto the mdf plate. Always keep measuring, and ensure that the screws are short enough to not interfere with other parts of the construction, yet long enough to hold the pieces together.
The PVC pipes are attached to the wings with hot glue.
Finally, I placed the PVC pipes in the wooden holders, and glued them with a little bit of hot glue – so that they wouldn’t swing around in the holders, and they always face forwards.
Afterwards, I painted it all black so it matched the vest. The hair pretty much covers the harness so that’s why I decided to make it a fully covered vest in the back.

Left image: the plate on the vest, with “grips” to receive the “hooks” from the other plate shown in the right image. The metal “grips” are elevated from the mdf plate with 3-4 washers, leaving just enough room for the hooks to slide into.
Right image: the “back side” of the mdf plate that the wings are mounted on.

The mdf boards I cut the plates from was 1cm thick. The PVC pipes had an outer diameter of about 12mm.

Now, for the things I would do differently if I were to do it again without time contraints. The biggest thing I would change is probably the mdf plates. They’re both 1 cm thick, so there’s no doubt that they’re strong enough, but their combined 2 cm thickness adds more bulk than I would like, and they’re pretty heavy. If I’d had more time to scout for materials, I’d have tried to find some thinner PVC/acrylic boards/plates as these are typically very strong even when they’re rather thin.
Another thing I’d have done differently, is to not bolt the receiving plate directly to the vest, but rather make a harness of belts that go around my arms/shoulders like a rucksack. This would spread the weight more evenly, and not run the risk of tearing the vest (though it is just a risk, I still have no tears in the vest).
Thirdly, either with mdf or pvc plates, I’d have just one plate on the harness I described under my vest, with the wings connected directly to this plate, and holes cut in the back of the vest for the pvc pipes to emerge through. This would reduce the bulk of the harness even further, and it would have fewer parts. But again, I opted for the solution I chose because I wanted to make sure it worked the first time with no problems, since I wouldn’t have time to spend on adjustments or remaking anything.

If you have any questions feel free to ask! <3

Header photo, edit by Ookami Cosplay Photography

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