How I Made My Bombshell Harley Quinn Cosplay

I love Harley Quinn. There's no doubt about it. When I was getting into cosplay and considering characters to portray, Harley was always at the top of my list, but her classic costume was a little out of reach for me and my ability as a noob in cosplay and sewing. I stumbled upon Bombshell Harley Quinn, probably on pinterest, and decided it would be an easy starting project.

I bought most of the pieces needed for this cosplay, the only DIY I did was painting the bra, making the jacket patch, and making the utility belt. With  the bra, it's actually a bathing suit, and I wore a push up bra underneath. I just painted the red on black with fabric paint.

Because the fabric paint wasn't as bright as I wanted it to, I decided to roll with it and got a darker wine red stocking to match. Because of my thick legs, actual thigh high socks squeeze my leg and create that awkward god awful pinching, so I bought leggings and cut off the legs. it fits much looser and can go as high as I want.

The jacket patch was a fun project, and there's actually already a really great tutorial online for it by Constantine Tokyo. I modified it a bit, because I wanted it to be thicker and more patch-like. I traced the logo off of my computer, using the screen as a light table. Then i outlined the lines in thick black marker. I taped it on a window, taped a chunk of white felt over the paper and started tracing the lines again flipping back and forth to confirm my lines through the felt.

​After the lines were drawn, I colored it all in with fabric paint, and re-traced the lines with black fabric paint. I'm really happy with the result! I just glued the patch to the the jacket using liquid stitch. I'm really sorry I didn't take more progress pictures *blush* please forgive me!! I'll do better in the new year! I promise!

The last thing I made was the utility belt, made entirely out of craft foam. There is an AMAZING website full of tutorials for different craft foam projects. Please check out The Foam Cave for all your cosplay craft foam project needs! As with the jacket patch, I heavily modified the tutorial to satisfy my lazy, cheap, amateur butt. I used double layered craft foam as the base belt in yellow. The belt buckle is my favorite part. I'm too excited to type right now. Look at my pretty belt buckle.

It's two layers of craft foam with an inverted bat symbol cut out. I primed it in wood glue a few times and then colored it with gold sharpie! The pouches are alternating black and red. I used thick strips of craft foam wrapped around little side strips, all glued together. I added a circle of craft foam for a little button.

​You can make your pouches function-able, but for how small they were, it wasn't a practical decision for me. As you can see in the picture, after wearing it all day at a convention, the craft foam gets a little squished. If I was to remake this, I would stuff the front pouches to get rid of the hollow-ness which allowed for the squishing. Me make words good.

​ANYWAYS, the pouches are just heavily glued to the belt at equal intervals, alternating in color, carefully spaced to hide the seam in the back. I used velcro behind the belt buckle to keep the belt attached.

I totally forgot about the black choker for the costume, so last minute I tried to make something out of craft foam. I shaped it, and then primed it with wood glue. I decided to give it a little suicide squad twist, and added "Puddin" to the collar. I painted the whole thing black and outlined the letters in gold for a little extra sparkle and definition.

The choker didn't end up lasting at the convention. I should have added a velcro attachment at the back. The whole thing kept stretching out, falling off and the paint and glue was cracking everywhere. I've since learned my lesson when it comes to working with craft foam.

The hardest part of this costume was the face paint. My GOD. I tried countless techniques and I didn't even bother taking pics after my first makeup test. These pictures are using white cream based face paint, smeared on as evenly as possible in one layer.

The second test I literally just used layers of baby powder and hairspray. Eww. I couldn't get rid of the powder look. The third test was a white body crayon I found at Spirit Halloween. The packaging was less than helpful in finding ingredients, but I figured it was grease based because it never dried. I ended up using this for the day of the convention. I just had to keep reminding myself to not touch my face.

Later on, when I did a photo shoot of Harley, I used the same crayon, but i spread it out further so it wasn't as bright white and it looked smoother.

​Here's the summary on Cosplanner.

​You can now buy Harley prints in my Etsy Store!

​Next up: My weekend experience at the Edmonton Comic and Entertainment Expo!

Make sure you're caught up on previous posts before next week!!

*kiss kiss*