As we saw (HERE [making-of Ammit]), I ended up working on Moon Knight costumes somewhat by chance, or at least, a bit late in the game… I honestly really loved the god designs in the series, and especially Khonshu's. And naturally, a tall, skinny, slightly unpleasant character was made for me!
I worked on Ammit and Khonshu's costumes simultaneously, but unlike Ammit, where I documented the process for Neevillia, I have few photos of Khonshu, so this article will probably be lacking in illustrations.
With the “Making-of” articles, I come back to the overall design of a character, including the mistakes made along the way, and even when possible, the sewing part (of which I generally have very few photos…)..
1. Costume choice
Khonshu technically has two costumes in the series: his "main" outfit, seen in almost every episode, with mummy bandages, and his outfit at the very end of the series, a really ugly white mobster suit… Needless to say, I went with the mummy version…
Just like with Ammit, I found it quite difficult to find reference images. There are plenty of illustrations from the Moon Knight comics, but from the series…
Luckily, since Khonshu appears in several episodes, sometimes even during the day, I had a bit more luck than with Ammit.
Ironically, I found quite a few close-ups, something like a week before the deadline (I was looking for images of the sceptre at the time…), just enough to see all the differences, but not enough time to correct them. Joy!
2. Pieces list
At first glance, Khonshu simply appears to be a kind of mummy, covered in bandages, with a bird's skull, like a tall stem against a beige background. But in reality, Khonshu has many small details.
First, of course, a bird's skull had to be made, also a usekh (a kind of collar/breastplate), a crescent moon worn on the chest, a belt, and a sceptre.
Regarding the "sewing": the bandages covering the entire body, but also a kind of harness (where the crescent moon rests on the chest), and a sort of bandaged vest (very important for the dramatic effect with the bandages fluttering in the wind; even indoors, a dark hallway is best for optimal results!), as well as a small loincloth (because, apparently, loincloths are my passion, see: Alphonse).
3. Crafting
- The Bird Skull:
Just as the crocodile head was the central element for Ammit, the bird skull is Khonshu's most striking feature, so that's where I started.
Let me be clear from the start: my skull isn't perfectly "movie accurate."
I opted for a less realistic version, closer to the comics, with fewer details to make it a bit less "gritty." The beak is also slightly shorter, again closer to the comics, to balance the overall look. I'm probably shorter than the Khonshu from the series anyway.
That being said, let's get down to business:
I didn't create the skull pattern from scratch. I found a crow skull pattern on Etsy, by Mugiwara cosplay, which served as my base, even though I modified it extensively afterwards.
So I made a first prototype using a floor mat:
This is technically the second prototype; for the first one, I kept the original beak.
So it's partly my fault, but I had trouble understanding the different cuts for the pieces (some edges needed to be cut at a 45° angle).
On the pattern, dotted lines and a red area mark the bevelled cuts, and other black dotted lines indicate the placement of certain pieces. However, I printed everything in black and white, so I cut all the dotted lines at an angle… As a result, it looked rather ugly, especially around the cheekbone.
It should also be mentioned that the pattern is designed to be made with 10mm foam, not 5mm, so the angled cuts are much more pronounced in 10mm foam.
But hey, that's the point of a prototype!
So I made a second prototype, this time in EVA foam, taking into account my beveling errors.
There was definitely an improvement! But some details weren't quite right. Naturally, this wasn't a pattern specifically designed for Khonshu, so modifications were necessary, starting with the beak.
So, I obviously modified pieces 1 and 2, which make up the beak, but I also removed piece 12, which I felt served no purpose for me other than folding inwards (due to the foam's lack of thickness).
Khonshu has a more pronounced expression with a hollow between his eyes, as if he were perpetually frowning.
To achieve this, I completely remade piece 5, widening it and reversing the cuts to create a hollow instead of an edge. To further accentuate this, piece 1 has a cutout to form a hollow on the bridge of the nose.
This hollow is much more noticeable in the series.
Finally, since I still wasn't happy with the cheekbone (even though it was correctly assembled this time), I decided to merge pieces 9 and 10 to remove the edge, and conversely, by changing the angle of the cuts once again, create a hollow for prominent cheekbones:
Before adding the details, I closed the back of the skull. Nothing too complicated. I once again used my helmet base, the famous chip bowl (and if you don't know what I'm talking about, I suggest you check out the making-of videos Alphonse, or Barry, and more recently, Ammit.
I kept an old helmet base (which was originally intended for Barry's helmet, but met a tragic end). So, I simply taped Khonshu's face to this base temporarily to see how much I needed to reduce the height of the forehead, and then I made a base based on those measurements.
With that, the base of Khonshu's skull was finished. All that remained was to sculpt the rest to give it some depth, as Khonshu has a sort of cranial eyebrow (to look displeased in all circumstances, even in death).
You can also see the shortened helmet base.
It's amazing how much it changes its expression when you compare the before and after:
A very small last-minute modification to the base was to reduce the size of the eye sockets;having a base to work with made sculpting easier. I could have done it earlier by modifying part 4, but it wouldn't have made any difference since the joint would be covered by the EVA foam clay.
One last detail, which I don't have a photo of, is that I added long, irregular striations to the beak to give it some texture. All I had to do was draw lines with a marker and then go over them with a Dremel tool using a fine bit.
In the making-of video for Ammit, I mentioned my fear that the scale texture would be erased by the pre-painting primer, which was a viscous, vinyl glue-type base. Well, that's exactly what happened with Khonshu's skull! Since the foam had quite a few small imperfections to hide (scratches, seams between pieces, the transition between the foam paste and the sheet foam…), I didn't dilute my base coat. But for the beak, I should have; the base coat filled the grooves to the point of making them completely invisible.
So I had to carefully peel off the vinyl base coat along the entire length of the beak (without damaging the rest…), carefully remove the grooves, and then apply a new base coat (diluted this time) and paint.
For the paint job, it's a "skeleton" base coat for miniatures that I airbrushed. I don't have a photo of just the base coat, except for this one:
which is more of a Khonshu cameo than anything else. You can even see his bandages hanging from the door. Sheldora, or quality photos!
After that, I used brown paint, again with an airbrush, to create shadows on the skull and give it a bit more depth. I think it looks pretty good, especially considering my love of painting…
- The usekh:
The usekh is the breastplate necklace worn in ancient Egypt.
Khonshu's has a fairly classic shape, round with a sort of raised edge like a collar.
To create the patterns for the usekhs (Khonshu's and Ammit's), I used my mannequin as a base, covering it with masking tape, then tracing directly onto it, in blue for Khonshu and in black for Ammit.
This allowed me to establish a basic pattern, but ultimately, I modified it so much that I could have saved myself the trouble of tracing a rough shape flat, rather than taping everything down.
Fun fact: the Khonshu usekh can easily be repurposed as a Breton hat:
s you can see in this exceptionally elegant photo, the brim of the usekh was too wide, so I stiffened it by glueing a strip of foam to the inside.
The decorations are done with 3D paint and a half-round piece of foam that hides the seam between the body of the usekh and the collar. Then the whole thing is painted gold:
The usekh is barely visible in the final image because the harness partially obscures it.
- The belt:
Khonshu's belt seemed simple to me until I started working on it. In fact, it's ridiculously complicated.
First of all, it's silver, which is a bit odd when all the other accessories are gold. But more importantly, it depicts what I assume are two jackal heads in profile surrounding a large (gold) scarab beetle, the whole thing (except for the scarab) formed by coils and grooves.
Inspired by how I made Ammit's hair beads, I initially thought of sculpting a jackal head to mould and make several casts.
It wasn't until I had sculpted half of the belt buckle in polymer clay that my spatial reasoning finally kicked in, and I realised that with this half, I wouldn't be able to make a mirror image of the other side...
I think at that point, I was starting to get sleep-deprived.
So, change of plans. I was going to have to sculpt the other half of the jackals, and either make a mold to cast them in a lighter material or keep the Fimo version. I decided to keep the Fimo version (out of laziness, but since the Fimo version, spoiler alert, wouldn't be the final version, it's not so bad; I avoided unnecessary work). The base of the belt would, for a change, be made of EVA foam.
At this point, things were going pretty well; it looked decently like Khonshu's belt… only twice too big. Honestly, on it, it looked like one of those wrestling trophy belts. Like one won in the ultra-lightweight category, judging by Khonshu's size…
Since I had ABSOLUTELY no desire to sculpt the heads again (you wouldn't believe it, but it took me about two hours), all that just to realise again that it was too big (or too small, or too wide, or…). I took a picture of the oversized belt so I could create a diagram in Inkscape that I could then print at a reduced size.
The diagram would then serve as a guide for sculpting the pieces to the correct size.
After several attempts and a few minor adjustments here and there, this version was ultimately chosen as the modelling reference:
It might not seem like much, but the size change was really noticeable once everything was assembled on the foam base.
Since the belt buckle would also hold the small loincloth, I reinforced the lower band with a length of reinforcing wire to stiffen everything up.
Well, this is still the WWE version, but you get the idea.
And to avoid it looking too bulky (WWE still…), I decided against making the belt from a single block of foam that went all the way around the waist, and instead opted for a buckle attached to a strip of fabric.
The rest of the belt buckle decoration is made with an arrangement of foam half-dowels of various diameters, mainly 0.5 cm:
The scarab (I kept its Fimo version, but with reduced thickness) is painted separately in gold and pearlescent.
A little wash and a loincloth later, and the belt is (finally!) finished:
- The sceptre:
Last non-fabric element: the sceptre. To be honest, I rushed it quite a bit. It deserved more time (it must be the curse of sceptres; it's best to avoid talking about Loki's ). Khonshu's sceptre is basically a huge moon with embellishments.
First, gather the largest round kitchen utensils you can find:
Use them to trace a first moon onto paper. Then realise that the points of your moon are much further apart than the original, and tweak your moon several times until you get a semi-decent result. I don't know why, but getting a moon shape is strangely difficult for me.
Anyway, for the moon, I did pretty much the same thing as for Palutena's sceptre, with a central moon made of thick foam (here, 10mm high-density foam) sandwiched between two narrower moons cut from thinner foam (5mm high-density foam).
The decorations are made of 3mm foam and wrap all around the sandwich.
By the way, the central moon is cut at an angle in the middle.
To lighten the sceptre, and because I knew Ammit's hair would already take up all the space in the car, the sceptre handle isn't made of wood but of detachable PVC.
The moon is first attached to a curtain rod end for decorative purposes:
The curtain end is itself attached to a PVC pipe fitting, which allows for a better connection between the moon and the handle. The fitting will later be hidden by a half-round of foam wrapped around the handle.
The rest of the handle is made of two pieces of 28mm diameter PVC, joined together by another fitting, which allows the sceptre to be separated into two pieces. Furthermore, with just the upper part, you get a very large Sailor Moon staff:
I will punish you, in the name of the MOON!
A few small additions of EVA foam decorations, and the sceptre was ready to be painted, gold and silver for the moon and bronze for the rest:
It could use more time, especially for the painting, but it's still good.
4. Sewing
Sewing is a bit of an exaggeration; it refers more to the fabric aspect, because aside from a little hand-stitching, there isn't really any sewing on Khonshu. And for good reason: he doesn't have clothes, but rather:
- Wrappings :
Khonshu is a mummy, and like all self-respecting mummies, his entire body, except for his bony skull and the absence of a neck, is covered in wrappings.
It would have been difficult to wrap myself in real wrappings that very morning, so I opted for pre-wrapped ones. Let me explain:
I did manage to make kilometres of wrappings, but unlike mummies, who generally have the decency not to move around too much, I was going to have to walk and sit, bend my arms… So, I chose to use a slightly stretchy fabric with still a woven look, like linen or cotton. Khonhsu's bandages are therefore… made of denim.
White denim, to be precise, from which I cut long strips 5cm wide:
I even treated myself to this amazing rotary cutter for the occasion.
Since my jeans were far too white, the second step was to soak my strips in black tea to give them a vintage look.
As an aside, TheMom had brought out a loose-leaf tea, supposedly stale given its age, cherry blossom tea, but it turned out to be green tea, not stale at all. So I drank my "Geisha tea" while searching for another aged tea.
In the end, an old (black) lychee tea did the trick.
Once dyed (timed precisely so that all batches would have roughly the same shade), the strips had to dry, transforming the bathroom into a mummification workshop:
Once dry, all the little elastic threads that were sticking out still had to be trimmed to create a slightly fringed, but neat edge:
A LOT of little threads.
And all these steps are repeated every ten strips, until you have this:
To make it easier to put on the strips, they are glued onto basic garments: pants and a bodysuit. And for the fashionista among you, the bodysuit is worn over the pants to hide the seam at the waistband. I'll let you imagine the look without the strips.
To make sure the base pants fit as close to the body as possible, I opted for white slim-fit pants, exactly the same style as my everyday pants, so I knew how they would fit. They're the Soho model from Mango, by the way:
I did, however, remove the pockets, belt loops, and everything else that might add bulk.
The bands are glued, not sewn, to save time, and even then, it took a loooooong time.
Securing the bandages was extremely time-consuming. It involved wrapping the bandage, for example, around the calf, tracing the edge of the bandage along its entire length with a pencil (unrolling it as I went), then applying contact adhesive to the pencil line, applying adhesive to the top of the bandage along its entire length, and finally, once the adhesive was dry, re-wrapping the bandage and securing it permanently.
Even alternating legs, tracing the left leg while the adhesive on the right leg dried, it took me over an hour to complete the area shown in the photo. For the arms (just the arms, not the torso), with TheMom's help, it took us three hours.
Using hot glue would have been faster (ignoring the risk of burns, of course), but not flexible enough in areas of tension (joints, etc.). In some places, for example, at the waist, I used hot glue.
The finger situation:
Khonshu has bandaged fingers, and I had originally planned to use thinner strips to attach them to gloves, but the result was very ugly, too thick, and came undone in places. So I covered his sleeves with bandages up to the first knuckle (the sleeve was held in place at the thumb) and simply used tea-dyed cotton gloves for his fingers. Sometimes you have to make compromises.
For his feet, I had to buy the ugliest shoes in the world! Sock-like shoes (for the stretch) that were completely white!
Something like this, but white:
They easily make it into my top list of the strangest/ugliest things I've ever had to buy for a cosplay.
I simply covered them with strips of fabric glued on with hot glue.
- The harness:
I'm not quite sure what to call this thing; it's a kind of leather harness with a crescent moon attached to the middle of the torso.
I kept it simple: the two harness shapes were traced on paper and then cut out two of each piece from cream-colored faux leather, one rounded at the bottom, the other pointed. I sewed one piece together at the hip and another at the shoulder to form a loop. And there you have it!
The two strips slip over the head.
To add dimension, I painted the harnesses (deliberately rather haphazardly) with grey paint to highlight the texture of the faux leather and create a less monochromatic look.
The moon, made using the same principle as the usekh, is cut from 5mm EVA foam, then decorated with 3D paint and painted gold. It slides between the harnesses using a slot:
Ugly fitting, but the harness don't fit my mannequin well:
- The bandage vest and the loincloth:
The bandage vest was one of my favourite things to make, and I don't have any progress photos. Aaaaargh.
I found some linen-look fabric (real linen was way too expensive…), from which I cut strips the entire length (1.50m), not with scissors, but by tearing them, the same way fabric is cut in some fabric shops, to get a frayed edge rather than a straight one.
Two of these strips were sewn together to make a 3m long strip, which, draped around the neck like a scarf, would serve as a base for the others.
The other strips are sewn perpendicular to the long strip, creating irregular darts.
Once I had the shape, I dyed it, not with tea, but with acrylic paint, diluting it to a blue-grey in a large volume of water. (This is the same method as for Ammit's arms[making-of Ammit])
I folded a remaining strip in half, then pleated it to make the loincloth for the belt. It's also dyed with paint, but in a colour closer to that of the body bandages. The less diluted paint stiffened the fabric, eliminating the need for weighting like for Alphonse's loincloth.
And so, final result:
Like Ammit, it's sadly the only picture I have.
Conclusion
I'm writing this making-of several months after wearing the costume, as is often the case. And as is often the case, I'm both amazed by the progress, looking back at photos from the early stages of the design process and thinking, "Did I make that? Wow!" and horrified, thinking, "Why didn't I do this and that..." or "Why did I do it like that?!"
With time, I mostly see the flaws in the costumes...
Khonshu, like Ammit, wasn't particularly difficult to make, but the lack of time led to several meltdowns, even a feeling of being incompetent. Yet I quite like this cosplay!
It's a bit like my Medusa costume; there aren't any elements I hate, but everything is just okay. It deserves some reworking, but I don't think I'll have the opportunity to wear it again.
For each cosplay in my making-of videos, I highlight one or more negative points, and conversely, I try to find at least one positive element.
- The harness could use a little more work to give it more body; it doesn't quite hang that well.
- Khonshu is a bit too clean and smooth; the weathering on the costume should have been done a bit more.
- The skull is pretty good, even if it's not "movie accurate." I had to skip the lower jaw, which is a shame. But for once, I'm happy with my painting.
- The belt buckle, again, isn't a perfect copy, but I have to admit it was fun to make, and it allowed me to think about new ways to use Inkscape.
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I said I didn't think I'll have the opportunity to wear it again, but I did! And I correct some things. I did a special (French) post call «Venez on améliore!» («Let's improve it!») But I still need to translate it into English...