Incredible Pop Art Girl Costume

This is me wearing a full head-to-toe pop art girl outfit that I made myself (excluding the dress). I’ve seen a few people wearing pop art inspired costumes, and even myself have tried it, but in both cases, red dots were used (which ends up looking odd), and the pop art effect was only used from the chest up. I decided to revamp an old makeup job of mine and do a full body version, since I have never seen ANYBODY do it before!

Originally I made the costume for a comic book convention that I was invited to semi-last minute, so I only had about a week and a half to complete a costume. For the arms, I bought a pair of tights, cut a hole in the crotch for my head to go through, then put my arms through the leg holes. Once I put my hands inside of where the feet go, I drew lines in between my fingers so I would know where to cut.

I then took the tights off, cut where the lines were, then hand sewed them to create fingers of the glove. Once both hands were finished, I put the tights back on and used fabric paint to cover the gloves with dots (I used white fabric paint and a q-tip to do this.) Then I grabbed a paint brush and painted the black detailing lines onto the gloves. I did one arm a day since it was a bit time consuming. I also had to make sure I was wearing the glove while painting it to ensure that they didn’t stick together when dried. Once the paint was dry, I took the gloves off and hung them up.

The next step in finishing the hands were getting a set of press on nails and painting around the bottom with a thin black line to give them a drawn on look, as well as painting white “”shine”” marks to give them a bit of life. Once those dried, I put the gloves back on and hot glued the nails to the appropriate fingers (which yes, it did REALLY hurt, but I had to wear them to ensure the fingers of the glove didn’t glue together. The pain was worth it!)

I then moved on to the legs and used the same painting technique as I did for the gloves (fabric paint on tights, white dots, black lines). Once dried, I hung them up with the gloves until it was time for the convention.

But the dots don’t stop there! The back of the dress had a low dip in the back that I wouldn’t be able to put makeup on (plus if I had someone else paint me, it would still probably smear by the end of the day), so I decided to take the control top from a pair of tights that I messed up on (it took me two tries to get the gloves right), and sew it on to the back on the dress (using a kind of loose hand stitch, considering I knew I wouldn’t wear the costume forever, and the dress is cute on it’s own, so I wanted to be able to take it off once I retired the costume). Then I painted white dots on the control top to keep with the continuity of the rest of the costume. Once that was dry, I hung it up with the arms and legs of the costume until it came time to wear it. (You can see in one of the images, I am showing this detail to the cosplay contest judges.)

I also styled the wig myself from an old cosplay wig! Since heat from a curling iron can’t be used on synthetic hair, I rolled the wig into rollers and used boiling hot water on the wig and waited for it to dry, once dried, I unrolled the hair, combed through it a little to the curls weren’t as tight, then used a black hairspray to “”draw”” on the wig to make it look 2D. While I waited on that to dry, I outlined a speech bubble on foam poster board, and looked up a nice comic book looking font. I traced out the words I wanted (“”OH MY…””) and then painted it onto the foam board. I did this on both sides of the foam board so that the words would be read even if I wasn’t facing forward. Once dried, I took some easily bendable thin wire and stuck it through the foam, then wired it through the netting of the wig. to keep it in place, I then hot glued the wiring to the foam and to the base of the wig.

For makeup, I used my normal foundation routine underneath, then painted on white dots and the black lines using Halloween grease paint. I then moved down to my chest area and did the same (minus the base foundation). The makeup overall took about four hours. I then accessorized with POW! hair clips and a matching necklace.

As for the costume contest that I mentioned above (and can be seen in one of the pictures attached), I ended up winning third place in about 150 contestants overall. I got a free t-shirt as a prize. As well as having people mistake me for a cardboard cutout lol.

Overall I’m extremely pleased with the outcome of this costume considering the amount of time I had to complete it, and the amount of work I put into it. I’ve gotten many uses from it (including Halloween when I went to go see a drag show, which is also pictured above), and I hope to get many more. Hopefully you love this costume as much as I do!