Costume Notes: She-Hulk and Red She-Hulk

Hours Spent: Approximately 10 hours

Debuted: Dallas Comic Con Fan Days

Why This Costume: I’ve been interested in making Jennifer’s classic suit for a while, but the final push for this costume came from my mom. Apparently the cosplay bug bit her after going with me to Dallas Comic Con last year as Supergirl, and she wanted to team up with me for another costume. When she mentioned that she liked She-Hulk, I knew we had to team up as She-Hulk and Red She-Hulk!

How I made it: All in all, this is a pretty simple build with the exception of body paint. Aside from the leotards, most of the pieces were purchased.

Purchased pieces:

• Wigs: Black Ayumi from Purple Plum (with clip-in extensions from Sally’s) and Hera in Forest Green from EpicCosplay
• Gloves: Amazon
• Shoes: Amazon
• Tights: We Love Colors Solid Tights in Crimson Red and Olive Green
• Body paint supplies: Mehron’s Paradise Collection in Dark Green and Beach Berry, Ben Nye setting spray and powder

As I mentioned in my review of M7217, Yaya Han‘s Ultimate Bodysuit pattern is pretty straight forward. For regular She-Hulk, I underlined all the white portions with white spandex scraps from other projects. My outer layer of white is moleskin from SpandexWorld. The black on Red She-Hulk was leftover scraps from Callula Cosplay‘s Huntress.

I wanted to give both of the Shulkie leotards a bit of pop for more visual appeal. To do that, I made the purple portions on both She-Hulks with milliskin from SpandexWorld overlaid with purple jersey cut from a pair of men’s basketball shorts. There was a bit of stretch to the jersey, so I cut the width of the pattern on the stretchiest part of the fabric. I attempted to dye the shorts, but I didn’t notice any real change in color.

On regular She-Hulk, I also added a strip of grey piping to between the white and purple sections. Check out this tutorial for detailed instructions on adding piping to spandex. It’s somewhat time consuming, but the results are so pretty!

Finally, I ditched the pattern instructions for a centered zipper and used an exposed zipper, as mentioned in the M7217 sewalong on the Cosplay by McCall’s blog. Such a simple detail, but it really makes the suit stand out!

I knew right away that I didn’t want to paint my entire body for this costume (just painting my face and doing makeup took about 2.5 hours), so I turned to We Love Colors for tights that I could use for the arms and legs of these costumes. For regular She-Hulk, I used olive as a base layer, and covered them with a pair of emerald tights I got off of eBay. I plan to swap those out with emerald tights from We Love Colors next time I wear this costume. My mom wore a double layer of scarlet red for the legs and a single layer in the same color for the arms. We both double layered for the legs due to opacity issues. I would highly recommend ordering a smaller size for your arms!

To make the tights work for the arms, I cut a hole out of the crotch and sewed a strip of 3/8″ elastic around the crotch hole to keep it from stretching out. I didn’t have time to do this on Red She-Hulk, and oh man, it makes a big difference as the day went on. Once the hole was in place, we wore the tights as a crop top, with the butt side in the front to accommodate the bust. After that, we used embroidery scissors to snip holes for the fingers and used Fray Check to keep them from running too much.

Body painting was definitely my biggest challenge with these costumes. I’d never painted myself before, and it was a much bigger undertaking than I expected. I’m so glad I did a makeup test in advance! I was pretty pleased with the coverage I got from Mehron’s Paradise collection. Definitely, definitely, definitely let your paint dry between layers and seal it! Also, take allergy medication if necessary. My allergies are bugging the crap out of me right now, so I kept having to touch up the inner corners of my eyes and my nose.

My makeup lasted quite well throughout the day, though I did get some on my costume by the sheer nature of it being white. Here are a few tutorials I found helpful for body painting:

• BelleChere’s FAQ on bodypaint
• Arms, Armor, and Awesome Cosplay has a 3-part video series on body paint
• How to make lipstick out of eyeshadow (because I refused to spend $15 on green lipstick)
• Elphaba makeup tutorial (great tips on contouring with eyeshadow)

Thoughts on this costume: I had so much fun wearing this! Jennifer is such a bad-ass babe, and it was awesome to embrace that. My mom and I are both trained in martial arts, so posing for our photoshoot was a lot of fun. Our photographer asked us to do a little sparring match for a video, which was one of the highlights of the day. I can’t wait to come up with our next mother/daughter costume!

Have you ever done a costume that required body paint? What did you think of it?