Cosplay Materials Checklist

Bill of Materials – Component List spreadsheet (Photo credit: IvanWalsh.com)

In the same vein as this article, there’s also making a materials checklist for cosplays.  This is absolutely necessary when trying to:

• Manage costs/keep track of spending
• Keep track of what you bought already
• Various ideas/methods of how to approach making a particular costume
• Serve as a reference for future cosplays
• Doubles as a shopping list
• Keep track of awesome sites that you used in the process of making your costume
• etc., etc.

Without rehashing too much since I more or less covered it in the above mentioned article, this checklist is going to double as your notes for making your cosplay, whether they be super detailed or only list the bare essentials is up to you, but I have a tendency to be super anal retentive about note taking.  Also, this list will also double for general cosplay note-taking because I find it relatively hard to make a straight materials checklist since there’s usually multiple ways to do anything for any cosplay & I like to reflect that in my notes.  Especially if you’re a really visual type of person, making a checklist makes it easier to envision the things mentioned in the bulleted list above without driving yourself crazy trying to remember everything & why you decided to do it that way.

Without further ado, this is an example of mine…

Sengoku Basara Cosplay Notes Snippet

Ieyasu Tokugawa from Sengoku Basara 3

 

…as you can probably tell, it’s still incomplete (since I haven’t really decided on this cosplay yet) & that it’s just a snippet of the entire piece, since this document is going to serve as my general notes document for all of the Sengoku Basara cosplays that I’m presently debating on which to cosplay.

Just by looking at it, I tend to list all the possible methods I’m considering for making any one piece of the costume, as well as reference other methods I used for previous cosplays so I can already begin to visualize exactly how I’m going to do it.  In essence, it really serves to organize your thoughts & ideas in a more concise, visual way that also doubles as reference material for future cosplays to come.

Hope this article helps especially for those who are struggling with remembering all the stuff they need for a cosplay & are constantly forgetting.