Making Ant-man

A friend of mine suggested we do Ant-man and Yellowjacket for a convention close by. I did Ant-man. For me this was no small feat, I have never made a sewing pattern and the extent of my sewing expertise was to make pillows. I didn't let this stop me and went working on putting it together. The next few steps are a fun through of what I did to make my character come to life.

Before doing anything I gathered as many reference photos I could. To start the pattern making process, I took out my duct tape dummy. If you don't have one or a mannequin to work from just do a quick search there are tons of instructions for them. To start my pattern I took some painters tape and "drew" all the seams and lines on the dummy that the costume would have. I only did half of the suit knowing that I would mirror the opposite side to complete the pattern. It is important that since I only did half that I made sure I did the same half for both sides. Once I had a pattern drawn, I made note of where there was seams or the fabric should be folded. I then pulled the tape of being careful to keep the pattern in tact and transferred it to paper where I could cut out pieces.

Ant-man had a lot more to it than just some pants and a shirt with a helmet and I had to make all of those too. I am familiar with wirking in foam and making templates so I decided that would be the medium that I would use. I got basic measurements of belt, shoes, shoulder pieces, and the back piece. I then made a template and cut them out. Those pieces were transferred to foam and cut and glued with a glue gun. The helmet I had used a pepakura file and done some heavy modifications to. To attach pieces to the costume I used tiny earth magnets. To spice up my belt I took some tubes and filled them with a glue/water/glitter mixture, then sealed them with some more hot glue and wrapped the ends with silver paper.

Now that a pattern was made it had to be sewn up and accessories sealed and attached. I sewed most of the costume first. The accessories I sealed by spraying plastidip and then painting. To give the pieces a more worn look I painted a metallic black as a base coat and gave a quick spray of silver as s top coat. Magnets were then attached and glued on using e6000, I also glued the corresponding magnet on the suit with e6000, allowing each side to dry overnight to ensure it lined up correctly. I also glued some foam sealed in plastidip to a pair of shoes with leftover fabric to have them match up a little better. The tubing from the helmet to the back pack was tubing used to gather wires to keep them organized. The final touch to the costume since I didn't trust myself to sew it on was the silver tubing. I order a 5mm black tubing which I spray painted silver a slowly glued on with more e6000. I only glued down a few inches at a time because it was messy and the glue took 30 minutes to start setting so it too a while to glue each piece. The accent pieces on the tubing was glow stick connectors, thanks to a fellow builder for giving me that hint. When I was getting close to completion I put everything on the dummy to ensure it was matching up correctly. The final piece of the suit to make it a bit more accurate was to airbrush black around the tubing and fade it away. This made it also have a more worn look.