Book Review: How to Cosplay volume 1

Cosnote (2009). How to Cosplay. Graphic-Sha. ISBN: 9784766119602

As the title says, this book is about teaching you how to cosplay. Volume 1 has a make-up focus and has tutorials for all sorts of make-up things. It's a good book for not only beginners but also intermediate level cosplayers.

It starts with basic tutorials like how to apply foundation.

Then progresses to all manner of sculpting the face using make-up placement.

And the last tutorials are for things like making and applying scars, bullet holes, webbed fingers and even how to do decent looking body paint.

Then after the tutorials there's convention reports with cosplay highlights. They interviewed the cosplayers too and found out character/series and (what really interests me) cost. It's super cool seeing what $100 in materials can get you in Japan. All of the conventions were in Japan but they did have a cool four page spread on World Cosplay Summit 2008!

The very last pages are adverts for cosplay related things like premade costumes, make-up and wigs.

This is a really cool book, it's got photo shoot pictures all throughout in addition to the pretty good tutorials. The only things I didn't like were that all of the products listed in their tutorials and advertisements are from Japanese suppliers. Make Up For Ever you can get Stateside but a lot of other things you can't. The other things I didn't like were their white and grey body/face paint tutorials because their finished results were uneven and splotchy! On the grey face paint one in particular they missed the bottom of the nose and several other small areas completely! But aside from those minor issues I think this is a solid book.

Sadly volumes two and beyond appear to be incredibly rare and I can't find them either in WorldCat (I try to get these review books through Interlibrary Loan because when they're free I can review more and see which ones I like best) or Amazon. :(

8/10 Lots of very solid tutorials and cool convention cosplay summaries. The photos are well done and the layout is very nice too. Loses points for a few bad tutorials. Did not lose points for showcasing make up that Japanese cosplayers would have easy access to since this is a translation of a Japanese text.