Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Wezrez Cosplay. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Wezrez, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?

Cosplayers draw from a variety of skills, from sewing to leatherworking to circuit design. It’s a jack-of-all-trades type of hobby that requires learning from many areas of life. I’m self-taught in most skills, and a proud student of Youtube University. There’s a tutorial for everything these days! I wish that I had taken formal sewing classes earlier in my cosplay career, because the process of self-teaching means that I don’t know the technical terms and techniques that formally trained sewists know. However, I’ve found that above all, problem solving skills have to be the most integral to the crafting and cosplaying process. Few things work on the first try, and often require creative solutions to be implemented.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

As a kid, I always had a love for creating and crafting. I had a large bin full of paints and markers and clay, and I would spend hours making art. Then, as I got older (and became more of a nerd), I discovered cosplay and had tons of fun sewing my own clothes and costume pieces. As I watched more movies and played more video games, I discovered characters with complex outfits consisting of different materials and moving parts, and my skillset expanded to include less traditional crafting techniques. I love learning new skills and luckily the process of making costumes requires me to do so. I started competitive costuming in 2021, so I’m very proud of the awards and recognition from expert cosplayers I’ve received the last three years!

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

I hope to someday cosplay abroad! My experiences over the last 12 years have been wholly contained within the US so it would be interesting to see how different cosplay is elsewhere. If I could compete overseas, that would be especially amazing, and I hope I get the chance to do so in the next five years.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

The most rewarding feeling is being able to look back on a particular costume or build and think “I made that”. Many times, I’ll start making a cosplay without much clue on how to create some aspects. But with tutorials and perseverence and sometimes just plain dumb luck, the cosplay turns out! On my latest build, I had to construct some method to mount six wings to my back and give them the ability to open and close. That was an intimidating project! But breaking it down into its smaller pieces was extremely helpful: first, tackling how I would construct and open one wing, and then scaling it to larger and larger configurations.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.wezrezcosplay.com/
• Instagram: @wezrez
• Twitter: @wezrezcosplay
• Youtube: Wezrez Cosplay

Image Credits

@getgeekish, @sero.tonin.shots @loststarsimaging @tlt_wm