Alphonse Elric Costume From Fullmetal Alchemist

"Humankind can not get anything without first giving something in return.
To obtain, something of equal value must be lost.
That is Alchemy's first law of equlivant exchange.
In those days, we really believed that to be the world’s one and only truth."

Hello everyone! I'm here to present to you today my Alphonse costume/cosplay!

To those of you who do not know who Alphonse Elric is, he is the brother of the main protagonist Edward Elric of the anime Fullmetal Alchemist. If you haven't read the manga or watched the T.V. show yet, I highly recommend you do—it's a fantastic series.

I wanted to out-do my costume from last year, so I went with another suit of armor, but from a different anime. I've always wanted to make a costume like this anyway, so I wasted no time in taking the opportunity.

The Process:

The costume took me around four months to complete all-in-all. Cutting the pieces took around three months (working on it during my free time), and the sealing/painting process took about a month. The overall process went as follows:

1. Planning and sketching
2. Prototyping sketched pieces by cutting them out on paper and gluing them together
3. Enlarging initial sketches to scale
4. Tracing sketched pieces on craft foam
5. Cutting craft foam
6. Hot gluing pieces together
7. Sealing pieces with watered-down tacky glue
8. Spraypainting with silver spraypaint
9. Waiting to dry
10. Adding extra details (Light-up eyes, etc)

I made the initial sketches by taking references from several pictures, snapshots, and even action figures and planning out each individual piece. This was the longest and most painful part of the process because of the sheer amount of time put toward making sure the proportions are right, that the pieces fit together, etc.

Cutting out the pieces and hot gluing them was fairly easy. I just cut out each piece and hot glued them as I already planned and sketched out during the initial phase of the project.

I tested the spraypaint with uncoated craft foam, but soon realized that it wouldn't put off the same sort of shine as I expected. I looked up some tutorials, and saw someone mention using watered-down tacky glue to seal the craft foam first, so I decided to give it a go. I filled a small container with tacky glue and then added water until it was about the consistency of acrylic paint. I used this to seal the pieces before spraypainting them, which gave the suit an excellent shine.

Last year, I wore black sweatpants and a black, long sleeve shirt to cover the joint areas in my costume. This year, however, I used a black morphsuit instead. It provides ample breathability within the suit and covers every possible joint area.

The eyes in the helmet were simple to make. I used a couple of LEDs from a couple of light-up party balloons, and put them between two pieces of regular copy paper. They're held in the helmet with velcro so they can be removed as needed. Turning off the eyes simple: just take out the batteries.

And that's it! Unfortunately, I didn't take any pictures of the building process. I'll make sure to take pictures next time, though!

Anyway, thanks for taking a look at my costume! This is my favorite costume thus far, and it was an awesome experience to boot! I look forward to making my next Halloween costume!

Best regards,
- Tomcat94