November 9, 2015

Propworks: Cardcaptor Sakura Wand Tutorial - Part 01 Getting Started

While wearing my Cardcaptor Sakura costume at the convention, I had a lot of people ask, "how did you make that wand?" so I figured that it would be a good time to write up a tutorial!

This tutorial will be in multiple parts to provide the detail I went through in making my wand so hopefully it will be helpful to other people! 

As always, if you make a wand using this tutorial LINK ME! I'd love to have pics of them in action!

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CARDCAPTOR SAKURA CLOW WAND TUTORIAL




Photo by Bananzers

GETTING STARTED

As with all my cosplay and cosplay props, I don't just dive in on a wing and a prayer and hope they work! While fun and exciting, there's a chance you might ruin a lot of supplies and waste a lot of money, so let's take our time and plan this out first, eh?

The very FIRST thing I do when making any cosplay or cosplay prop, is to find solid references. The costume I was going to be making is the dress shown below:


CD Cover from a Songbook. LET'S GET OBSCURE!

As you can see in the picture, she doesn't actually have a wand, but a microphone (I'm thinking of making one of those for myself too....), but if you notice the microphone head is very reminiscent of her original Clow Wand - the one with the bird shaped head she has in the first half of the series. It was also my favorite wand, so it helped in deciding on an outfit.

I went searching the internet and came to the conclusion I like the shape of the Clow Wand in the manga images rather than the show (the anime's images were more rounded feathers and I liked the sleek semi-angular wing look).


Too many cute outfits here....


So once that was decided, I went searching for an image with her holding the wand, viewed from the side, in a not-chibi picture. This will be used to create a wand that will look in proportion to me, which I'll explain about in a moment!


Finding this picture was a lot harder than it looks....
PROPORTIONS

When I make props for myself for cosplay, I like to make them proportionally sized to my body. What this means is that when I'm holding my Clow Wand, I want to make sure I look like I'm the size of a kid, not a full-fledged adult!

I happen to be pretty tall in comparison to a lot of my cosplay partners and pals, so trying to pull off looking like a little kid is really difficult sometimes, thus making a wand that's sized to me is ideal for that illusion.

This part requires a little bit of technical know-how: I took the image you see above, and cut out around the wand with an image editing program like Photoshop. Then I took the cut out part, and placed it into Photoshop/Illustrator, measuring the hand's width and then increasing the size of the image to match that hand with my own hand's width. Once the image was blown up huge, I printed it out in pieces, and taped it together.

This gives me a good visual cue on how big pieces of my wand need to be!


I realized around this time, it's going to be comedically huge.

Unfortunately I can't really give a specific tutorial on this part, as everybody is sized differently - I'm approximately 5' 7", and my wand ended up being a little over 36" long if that helps? Also, it will depend on what type of image editing programs you have at your disposal. It's not necessarily an absolute requirement, but it's good to have either a print out or calculated measurements you want to use.

Now that I had a good judge on how big my wand was going to be, it's time to get supplies!

NEXT PART: 02 SUPPLIES

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