Introduction: Adventure Time Costumes

About: A broke engineering student with a love for inventing and making.

Intro to the Adventure

Stuck for an awesome costume ? So were we.........

As college students, creating great costumes has a lot of drawbacks, mainly that we're broke and have no MONEY. So we decided to make these costumes as cheaply as we could.

We mainly used cardboard (my new favorite material), hot glue and cheap t-shirts found at a local store.

Welcome to my first instructable and I hope it provides you with some inspiration.

Apologies for the lack of pictures, but I didn't plan on creating this build article.

Step 1: Planning the Adventure

If you have ever watched Adventure Time you will notice that it is a 2 Dimensional cartoon. This posed some obstacles in terms of designing a 3 dimensional costume.

So firstly we imported some pictures of ourselves onto a computer and over a couple of beers worked out some appropriate sizes, proportions and ideas.

You can use image editing software to add a layer of your costume over the image of yourself which helps when working out appropriate proportions.

Step 2: Time for Supplies

We aimed to keep costs low. In total the build didn't cost us more than €40 for all 3 costumes.

Materials List

Cardboard - Cardboard was our life for the duration of the build, so get plenty of it. Try to source some big appliance boxes.

Colored card - can be sourced nearly anywhere

Glues - Hot glue, Superglue, Spray glue. ALL The Glue!!

Fabric - some colored material. We mainly used some XXL mens t-shirts

Spray paint - You might get away without it

Sewing machine - a needle and thread will also come in handy

Sharpie Markers - for some finer detail

Woman's tights - these work as a great mesh to see through.

Kitchen sieves - two for Jake's eyes

Yellow Pants- to cover your own for Jake's legs

Pillows - Cotton filled

Cotton Sheet - Ice kings beard


Step 3: Lets Make - Finn

This was my costume so this is the one I know the most about.

The Head

This took some prototyping to get the shape right but it is essentially just an elliptical cylinder that have a curved top.

Tip:I found it best to roll up the straightened cardboard in order to form nice even cylinders.

I used cardboard ellipses in the shape I wanted to form the cylinders around.

The ears were rolled, glued along the seems and then wrapped in material.

The Torso

Simply a sheet of cardboard curved like a cylinder with some supports to hold the shape on the inside.

This was covered with light blue material.

I decided to Velcro the back seam of him so that I could easily slip out of him should I need to.

The Velcro was assisted in place with some staples until the glue had dried.

The Pants

The pants were kind of an elliptical sphere shape that had room cut out for my legs to fit through.

Covered in material which was held with staples and glued in place.

The pants attached to the main torso via a piece of cardboard on the inside.

I also sewed some blue shorts to wear under the suit to match the Pants.

The Sword

The Sword followed the same procedure as the rest of the build.

It was given proportions on paper, cut out of cardboard, glued along the seems and spray-painted as desired.

(The Sword was my favorite part and I lost it :(

Step 4: Lets Make - Jake

Jake followed a similar procedure to Finn, Cardboard Cardboard and some more Cardboard

The Head

Jake's head is a dome. Robert calculated and cut out some slightly arced triangles that are glued at both the base and the top of the dome.

Any visible seams were then smoothed over with some paper mache as seen in the pictures

Once the dome was complete the eye holes were cut out and the sieves were put in place to see through.

The nose and ears were sewn out of some material and filled with the cotton from a pillow.

These were then sewn to the head.

A little mouth was also drawn onto some card :D

The Torso

The torso is a large, slightly tapered cardboard cylinder.

Arm holes were cut at an appropriate height.

The Base

The base is a slightly smaller version of the head but with the top section cut off so that he could comfortably get his legs through.

To support the structure Robert used straps from the inside of the base to the shoulders. This supported the torso and thus the head.

The head was shaped as a dome which was precisely cut and clued and shown

Finishing touches

As the material we had wasn't the right shade of yellow Jake was spray-painted and left to dry.

to finish he wore a yellow hazmat suit that he had from last years breaking bad costume.

Step 5: Lets Make - Ice King

Mark made Ice king which was a last minute addition to the crew

The Crown

Measure your head and make a cardboard cylinder in proportion.

Unfold the cylinder and cut three triangular peaks into the cylinder and trim the rest to form a band around your head and glue along the seam.

The cardboard used for the crown was already yellow so no coloring needed.

Add some diamonds. These were cut out of red card with some sharpie for detail.

The Face

The face was sketched in blue card until the proportions seemed correct.

It was cut out and a long trianglular nose was folded in the middle as glued in place

add detail with a black sharpie as needed

an elastic band was attached to both sides of the mask to hold in place around the head.

The Beard

The beard was simply some cotton sheet that was roughly cut to the desired shape and then glued to the bottom of the mask.

Some cotton was also clued to the back of the crown to act as hair.

The Cape

the cape was the trickiest part.. you could just but a blue dress with long sleaves but we decided to make one out of blue material from a fapric store. The material was folded over mark with a hole cut in the middle for his head.

Sleeved were made on the sewing machine but sewing a straight line to close a folded over rectangle of material and then turned inside out. these were left slightly loose to add to the ice king effect.

the sleeves were then sewen to the main cape with a needle and thread

Step 6: Go Have an Awesome Time !!

We got a great reaction to this trio of costumes and felt like celebrities on the night having to take pictures with almost everyone.

These were the first of their kind that I could find on the internet and thus i believe they will be a good help to anyone thinking down the same lines.

After Halloween we decide to keep the costumes as ornaments. Finns head as a living-room lampshade. We wrapped Christmas lights around Jake and strapped him to the wall as our college Christmas tree. Ice King was lost in the adventure on Halloween night never to be seem again.

I hope you like our build, please feel free to like and leave a comment.

Peace.