Posted on September 26th 2005, 07:48PM
Rating:
Critter Costuming by Adam Riggs is, at the time of writing, the first and only construction oriented book primarily focused on building fursuits or mascot costumes on a simple home basis. It comes in a handy spiral book format and can be bought at amazon.com.
The book consists of the following five sections:
Design and Planning
Tools and Materials
Head Construction
Body Construction
Masks, Makeup & Accessories
Performing Animal Characters
The first section of the book addresses the problem of actually selecting what kind of costume to make. A couple of common examples are given plus tips on how to give your character certain attributes. How do you make a character appear cute for example? Should you take any special precautions when designing characters that will be performing for small children? All these subjects and more addressed in the first chapter.
In the construction section we get down to business and see how to transform all that fur and foam into something that would actually be wearable. Firstly we look at synthetic fur, dyes, glue and foam and how to make it all work together. For all of these four items there's some very helpful comparison charts detailing what to use in the different situations. For example, how do you glue fur? And what type of foam are best for head construction? These questions are generally answered pretty well although it should be noted that the author writes this section from an american shopper's point of view and hence it might less helpful if you're situatated outside the states.
Next we look at the specifics of constructing heads. The subtitle for this section is "The head of a costume is 90% of the character", which I think most people even remotely interested in this kind of thing would agree with. This section contains two small walkthroughs - one describing the contruction of a foam head and the other showing how to contruct a wire frame head. The foam head walkthough shows the steps used to create on the green-eyed character on the cover. I particularly liked this section since it gives you definite instructions that you could follow 100% if you wanted to. Often when reading how-to books the author have a tendency to assume that the rookie-reader have creativity and imagination enough to visualize the most basic stuff from a simply two-line description. This is in my experience rarely true, so this section definitely gets a big plus on my scoreboard.
The last part is post of a meta construction chapter as it deals with stuff like how to transport a costume and how to perform in one. The latter is the most interesting in my eyes as it's a field where you would genuinely need some good advice to get a head start on things. It's true that some of the information in this section is a bit obvious, but there's plenty of it that isn't. For example; what should you do if you're attacked in costume?
A last thing worth mentioning is the little "Professional Profiles" that are scattered all over the book. In these little interview snippets we a few questions answered by some of the pros in the buisness. These include Mark Murillo, Lee Strom, Lance Ikegawa, Gill Wichi and others.
Pros:
- Good content
- Interesting format
Cons:
- Too many 'consult mare specialized literature' references
- No color photos except the covers
- Buy tips geared towards the US market
Conclusion
Critter Costuming is an excellent book that everyone considering to make a fursuit should get a hold of. It will give you the basic idea of the techniques and provide useful examples. It does, of course, also look quite good on the bookshelf.
Buy the book here! | Check out the author's site here!
 |  alexismckee (107)November 26th 2005, 09:28PM |
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| A highly recomendable book! [ Reply to this ] | ||