Mercury Prince

Harmaani/Amiti @
Photography @
Editing @ me
Lighting assistant @ Furen-chan

Taken at STGCC 2014. Finally a nice, clear full body shot of this costume since I first wore it years ago! …Apart from the fact that it’s a bit blurry and a bit grainy, but shhhh just zoom out and you don’t notice that 8D; Thanks to Hweein and Furen-chan for helping me with this!

Golden Sun belongs to Camelot.

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I first wore Harmaani at a private photoshoot with Mei as Chalice/Heart. Due to time constraints, I had to rush a lot of it out, and as a result accuracy was almost non-existent. Feeling that I didn’t do this lovely prince justice, I swore to redo him properly, but I didn’t get a chance until this year’s STGCC. 

Thanks to new skills and experience I’ve gained over the years, I’ve managed to make this attempt far better than the previous one. This is very likely the most complex costume in terms of details I’ve done so far, and I’m pretty satisfied with how I crafted most of it. Gone with the old, weak clay accessories; the new ones are crafted from the indestructible worbla (great for transport!). Although I’m still not very happy with the paint job for some of it; I did run out of time to prime and sand, and I also ran out of time to mix the perfect colours. X_X;;

All gold details are handmade appliques (including the 40+ tiny triangles on the headband you can barely see 8D;; ) sewn or glued on. Hanging rope things (what else do I call them..?!) were painted to get the colours I wanted, with worbla heated and moulded around them. The bracers and anklets are a mixture of cloth, leather and jumping clay, which was a method I used before as well. Remade them more neatly this time though.

The Crystal Rod is my pride and joy! Due to money constraints, I wasn’t able to remake the Tisiphone Edge as I originally intended to, but I really didn’t want to go without a weapon. As I had some scrap materials in store, I looked through the game for a weapon that was not too shabby, not too weak, but not too complex to make, and chose this one.

For the giant octahedron gem, I used clear styrene (first time working with it; I’m so thankful it turned out well XD) cut into triangles, then glued together. I put multiple layers of blue and white glass paint to get a bit of gradient around the edges. Unfortunately I made that too small, so it's barely visible from afar. The sepals underneath it was the great pain; I have never been good at patterning, and the way these were shaped in the game ARE SO WEIRD. It took hours of trial and error and cutting and taping before I managed to get the pattern down. The final result is a mixture of foam, newspaper and tiny bits of jumping clay to fill in the gaps.

Finally, to elongate the staff (the base wooden dowel I had was far too short), I used worbla, newspaper and aluminium foil. My only regret is that the art stores here ran out of the Rustoleum gold metallic spray, so I had to make do with this other brand that looks like dirty, moldy gold after it settles. Oh, and that I ran out of time to weather it properly. Welp, next time, I guess ;w;