The Fallen Kings from The Lord of The Rings
Sssshire… Bagginsss…
Photographer: Toten Pictures
These cosplays were for a project led by Elenya Frost. Idea was to have all 9 Ringwraiths walking around incognito at VIECC Vienna Comic Con 2019. Which we accomplished and it was very well received!
Overall data
Source: The Lord of The Rings
Work time: 50 hours (per costume)
Materials used: linen, wool, EVA foam, Chicago screws, belts, baseball cap, leather gloves, LARP swords
Making of
Elenya Frost and Vincent from The Blackwaters did the most work on this. Elenya Frost had everything planned, figured out the patterns, chose the fabrics and Vincent was kind enough to laser cut the EVA foam for all of our gauntlets.
We got the pattern for the gauntlets from Punished Props. Bill and Adam Savage worked on those together in a video. We basically made them exactly like in the tutorial video: Sanded the foam down a bit on the backside to make these ridges by gluing the sanded surfaces together. Movable parts are screwed together with Chicago screws and some parts were glued on. Following the tutorial they turned out really nice.
The robes consist of five individual pieces. The basic robe, a cloak, a mini cape and two rectangles, one is thrown over the shoulders and the other one is the hood. I roughly sewed all these loose pieces together. The robe is closed with two belts. It was a lot of work weathering all fabrics. We used a drill with sanding paper and a file to roughen up the edges. We then used a spray bottle with diluted white acrylic paint to mimic dust.
To recreate the impression of hollow robes without a visible person inside we had to extent the hoods a bit so our faces woul be hidden deeper in to the fabric. This was accomplished by modifying baseball caps with foam and then put the fabric over this. An additional piece of black fabric glued to the front edge of the caps, so directly in front of our faces, hides us sufficiently and the shadow of the hood does the rest.
Now we still needed swords. Since there wasn’t enough time to make them from scratch (cosplayers and time management XD) we bought LARP swords off the internet. Turns out, we accidentally bought Andúril, Aragorn’s sword! It was only labled as “crusader sword”, but I noticed when we they arrived. A few of our group also bought these swords, so we agreed on Aragorn now being a raid boss, who drops Andúril and it’s best in slot for us. I did add a bit of fake rust with acrylic paint and bent the cross-guard to fit the Nazûl look a bit better.
