GenCon Cosplay: Azul Tiles

GenCon is the Best Four Days in Gaming. It is also a great cosplay spot. Some folks go the comic or video game route. There were a ton of Stranger Things / Eddie cosplayers this year. You even see some board game representation (check out the awesome work happening at the Gloomhaven/Frosthaven booth next time you can).

A few years ago pre-2020, I ran into a family cosplaying as the whole Pandemic crew and LOVED it. As we were prepping for our return to GenCon this year, I pitched to my group that we dress up as one of our standby games - Azul.

Azul is a literal tile-laying game where you are a mosaic artist laying out Portuguese tile art. With a bit of creativity, I knew we could pull off the iconic look of the game tiles. Since there are three of us, we went with the three tiles that have actual designs on them. If we ever revamp this costume with a group of five, we can easily add in the plain red and blue tiles by grabbing some plain tee shirts.

Materials Used:

• Heat transfer vinyl (white, teal, red)
• T-shirts (teal, black, yellow)

The acquisition phase of this project was pretty straightforward. I knew I would be either screen-printing or heat-transfer-vinyling on the image, and HTV won the day because I didn't have screens on hand at the time. I used a Silhouette Cameo 2 machine and had some white heat transfer vinyl on hand, but I had to specifically order the Tiffany Blue Vinyl and the Red Vinyl to get the color match just right.

The shirts were easily acquired from a thrift store run on half-off day. I had to do a little bit of prep work for the blue shirt since it had a pocket, but that was easily remedied with a seam ripper. We popped them all into the wash and were ready to go. You could also just get new shirts if that is your thing.

(NOTE: Finding a yellow shirt without any printed logo at a thrift store was much more difficult than I had expected. I opted to go with the long-sleeve shirt as a compromise.)

Tools Used:

• Silhouette Cameo Cutter
• X-Acto (for vinyl weeding purposes)
• Iron / Ironing Board

The next hurdle after getting materials is to have a file to work with. I started off with some images of the actual tiles and digital versions from Board Game Arena. I wasn't getting the crisp sort of look that I was wanting, so I instead found a really great set of coasters on Etsy that I could use as a base because the images were big and easier to trace in Silhouette Studio. I cleaned up some artifacts, made the image a little more symmetrical, and sized them all up the same. Since I was limited by the size of the vinyl (12in width), my thought was to make them as big as possible and fill up the shirt front/back.

I've included the Silhouette Studio file below. No need to reverse the image for cutting because the image is symmetrical.

This is the hands-off step. I like to use a double cut on HTV to make sure there are no corners holding on, but I am sure there are other Instructables that can walk you through how to get a good cut out of vinyl. Since the actual Azul tiles are two-sided, I cut out two of each color - one for the front and one for the back of the shirt.

After they were cut out nicely, I weeded them with an X-Acto while watching an episode of Umbrella Academy. You can probably substitute another show and get similar results, if needed.

No images of this step, unfortunately, but it's straightforward. Lay out the shirt, center the image, iron on according to the instructions that came with the vinyl, and repeat as needed.

That's about it. At GenCon, we got dressed up in our comfy cosplay and hit the floor. The costume worked best when we were together in a cluster (imagine if we could get a full set of 100 together and fill a hallway!) but we still got some shoutouts when walking around solo. We made sure to nab a few photos at the Plan B Publishing booth and even made it on their Instagram page.

If I had a chance to do it again, I probably would have made some matching masks with the Azul logo to go with the shirts. Other than that, I'm pretty happy with the way it came out.

If we were to make a big batch of them for a group costume, I would definitely go the screenprinting route, but this was ideal for a one-off cosplay.