Struck First gives you a first look at a cosplay just as it's been debuted/had its first photoshoot. Cosplayers have been kind enough to let me have a first crack at analyzing the cosplay by providing me with brand new pictures.
Today, I've got a wonderfully passionate gal to share with you all. Canary Cosplay and I met through our mutual love/admiration of several other prominent cosplayers like Lisa Lou Who among a few others. She certainly has a huge love for both the Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy franchises so of course we'd get along fine XD. From standouts like Mama Ignis, to even other FFXV boys, she dipped into the iconic character of Tifa from Final Fantasy VII. However, this was done through Hannah Alexander's artwork/rendition of the character which you can see up at the start of this writeup. It certainly keeps with Tifa's color palette of red, white and black with some silver in there and Canary did a wonderful job replicating all of it. I remember watching her post update after update detailing what went into making this.
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| Photo by David Ngo |
For this Tifa, Ashley is rocking two main sections in both a small top and a long skirt/dress which opens up at the front. The wig is of a deep black shade with twin ponytails all braided up. She also has a small white headpiece made up of several strands of fabric. The top part is mainly white with very interesting patterns done up in red. Both of her arms are full covered sleeves with grey parts to make up gauntlet like pieces. This certainly keeps Tifa's nature as a fighter intact! I love how the spiked circles look!
The waistband part has some gorgeous embroidery that I saw Ashley had some struggles with if memory serves me right! She even sent me some personal notes about making this cosplay which you can read here:
This project was a huge passion project for me. I knew I wanted to compete in this costume so I wanted to make sure to take my time with it. I broke the costume down into sections and focused on one section at a time instead of making all the pieces at once.
My favorite part of the whole costume is the sash. It was the first piece I started to make because the embroidery was going to be done by hand, even the trimming on the sash is hand embroidered. The sash took me roughly 70-80 hours to embroider.
The most frustrating part for me were the gloves. Gloves are already a pain to make as it is, let alone fingerless gloves. I spent some time hand sewing the hems before I moved on to other parts of the costume. I ended up making two pairs of gloves since the first pair were way too small.
This costume had a lot of firsts for me. It was my first time hand embroidering and hand gradient dying fabric (that ombré look on the overskirt). This whole project took me seven months to finish since I spent a lot of time doing the hand embroidery, which took me in total about 100 hours to do and I did not want to rush any parts of it or else i would not have been happy with the final result.
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| Photo by TheFansPOV |
The white part of the skirt beautifully goes into a gradient of black with rad triangle patterning as you get to the bottom of the cosplay. The red portion seen in the middle has added white pieces, and the leggings also have a white pattern up at the top. One leg has a giant armor piece done in grey while the other leg is mostly bare of protection. For Tifa's boots, Ashley has fully laced up brown boots that go up pretty high! All the photos do a marvelous job showing off the cosplay, and she does a fantastic job posing. Mostly wanting to show off the armor placed on her arms! Check out these other shots!
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| Photo by Grace and Shine Photography |
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| Photo by Grace and Shine Photography |
Canary Cosplay is a wonderful gal and I highly recommend you check out her stuff on Instagram! She's just debuting pics of her Aqua-nort cosplay from Katsucon! SHE LOOKS SO AWESOME!
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