Fantasy To Reality

Ever since I was 4 years old I loved to draw and play with action figures; I eventually grew a hobby for creating and drawing my own superheroes and other fictional characters whenever I found an opportunity to do so. I drew on all sorts of things; from the walls in my room to the driveway outside, and as I grew older in test booklets in school. I began to notice through all of my doodling, I tended to draw a particular character more frequently than I drew the other characters. This fantastical dragon, looking individual, took the name of “Drago'' and became my favorite character that I would draw constantly. The more I drew him the more I started to become distressed in the thought of knowing that I would not be able to actually play with Drago as an action figure like I did with most of the figures I drew.

Instead of dealing with the fact that I couldn't really sew a plushie together, or craft up a metallic action figure, I began to create little fabric costumes for my favorite toy bear that I played the most out of all of my toys. Drago was the first of many costumes I would make for my stuffed animal toys. I made Marvel superhero costumes, Pirates of the Carribean getups, DC comic outfits, and some other atypical outfits that I just made up. I conducted this hobby of making costumes for stuffed animals until I was about 14 years of age because I grew out of playing with toys and moved on to just drawing, mostly. However, around the age of 15 I picked the hobby up once more and undertook the occupation of making costume pieces again; not for stuffed animals to wear, but for myself to wear. The first human sized costume piece I made wasn't something to wear, I had fashioned a 6’3 sword prop from a video game I’ve seen, from large cardboard boxes I’ve found. This began a little renaissance in my passion again; to make plenty of other cardboard and non cardboard props and costume pieces. My second composition was Drago, who after drawing him a bit more, decided to overhaul his style to fit a more Eastern Chinese Dragon look and changed his name to “Dragodon ''.



His first design was very simple and was relatively easy to do because of its simplicity. I was gonna leave it until I figured out what to do with it, so it sat on my shelf for a couple months where I went and made another 6’0 sword, a stormtrooper helmet, and Darth Vader's helmet. After all of these were to my liking, I played a Japanese samurai game with a close friend of mine. The game's main character wore a face mask to hide his identity which I immediately found very cool and inspiring. After beating the game, I went over to the Dragodon helmet and began sketching some ideas out. It didn't take long to design the lower part of the helmet, so I promptly got to work on the new version of Dragodon. I effortlessly made a fine mouth proportion to his face with direct inspiration from the Japanese inspired video game that galvanized me to do so.

I improvised when improving the rest of the helmet because I had gotten quite excited after crafting the mouth and I ended up making a pretty seamless design in the end, in my opinion. Before coloring the entire head I wanted to make the helmet look more “worn” and “traveled”, so I went and wrapped some black cloth and string around the skull to give it a “makeshift, repaired,” look to it. Before finally painting over the entire head, I wanted to give the spikes on the top of it a different medium other than just paint, seeing that it would make the entire piece of armour look more appealing. In the end, I added a cloth for the inside to make it comfortable to wear and attached orange cloth strips with little holes in them for the eyes.

At last, I covered the entire head with 4 coats of black spray paint; and called it a day. These little outfits and “prop things” are very fun to make for me, every time I make them it takes priority over everything else I do, for that duration of time. I plan to continue to make these costumes and replica items for as long as I am able, it is a very fulfilling hobby for me and I find mountain loads of joy working on these custom creations.