FFXIII: I Felt the Earth

_{"I walked across an empty land,
I knew the pathway like the back of my hand.
I felt the earth beneath my feet,
Sat by the river and it made me complete."}

~

Whew! It's taken a year, but I've finally revamped my Vanille cosplay! I'm still not 100% happy with it (I doubt I ever will be), but I've gotten it to a point where looking at it doesn't make me gag. I think this is as good as it's going to get, though - by now I'm so tired of working on this costume! And wearing it, too. I might do one more shoot with it in the future and then sell it.

Anyways! Everything was remade for this updated version. My main focus was improving the beading, though. On my first attempt I used pony beads because I was short on time and money, so this time around, I used coco and shell beads. In total, there are 2,876 beads on this costume, 771 of which are hand-painted. Talk about tedious! Not to mention that it cost me over $200 for the beads alone, ughhh. But it's the one aspect that I'm pretty happy with, so I guess it was worth it in the end!

And the fur. Oh, god, the fur. I'm not even going to go into how long it took me to find a suitable fur, and even then I still don't like what I picked, but ohhh well.

But I digress. I really do love Vanille, and it was fun getting a second chance at this costume! I'm going to miss it when I finally retire her. D:

For this photo, we were trying to mimic this screenshot: [link] We didn't have a copy of it at the shoot and I mostly had to go from memory, but I'm so happy with how it turned out!

As always, if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask!

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C o s p l a y e r s

_{[ Final Fantasy XIII ]
Oerba Dia Vanille ................}

P h o t o g r a p h y

_{[ Taken @ ACEN '11 (Rosemont, IL) ]
Brenda L. ..........................}

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P h o t o s h o o t