Stardust Gijinka Costume Design

I have a friend who wants to make this a real costume, so she asked me to design it for her:


Stardust Dragon Gijinka design by =slifertheskydragon on deviantART

the costume is based off of the Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's monster "Stardust Dragon"


I remember when I visited the Academy of Arts in San Francisco one time when I was checking out colleges that students in the fashion design major had a project to take a pop culture reference or basically take inspiration from something to create a whole outfit from it. One of the students had chosen a "Digimon" monster to base her outfit off of, and I thought it was very cool and needless to say, brave of her to do so.

For this costume design I kept the main aspects of the dragon in mind- the chest and shoulder orbs, the perforations on the skin, and most importantly the color scheme. I also had to keep in mind what was physically possible to create in real life, because as we all know, animation physics and physics in reality don't always match up. I feel that this costume captured the "essence" of the "Stardust Dragon" at a level that is possible to create with my friends' craftsmanship and costume-making skill, and I feel honored that she would create something based off of something I drew.

I feel it is always easier to create based off another work, especially with characters because you already have a developed base with which to work off of instead of having to come up with everything from scratch. But by working from scratch, the finished product is ALL YOU- from beginning to finish, you've poured your own ideas into the creation of something original. But then I feel it's more fun to create things based on stuff that you like and enjoy, because you enjoy making it for fun.