Ad-Astra 2009
The character designs and costumes from this series are just beautiful. I want to cosplay as so many of these boys! Yasuaki was my favourite character, so I decided to start with him. One of the easier costumes, but more difficult wigs.
All the pieces of this costume were drafted by me and are available at cosplaypatterns.com. The pants have a lace up front, as I was determined to avoid zippers. There are three layers to the robe, the first is orange and has long sleeves, the second is black with short sleeves. Both of these stop at the waist. The outer layer is black and white and had long sleeves and ends below the knee. It was interested to figure out how those layers worked.
Another fun problem I had was making the opening at the shoulder. I don't know what kind of magic people were using to design clothing in the Heian period, but I could not for the life of me figure out how to get a larger opening without having the sleeve fall down to my elbow.
The wig: I purchased two of the same wig from ebay, because I knew I would not find extensions to match the colour. One was chopped up for the loose hair, while the other was pulled into a side ponytail. I took a styrofoam ball, carved a grove in it for the ponytail to slip through, and then covered it in the hair from the second wig.
Images 1 - 8: Courtesy of Kevin at Stillvisions Photography