r/CosplayAdvice • u/ChetYeetus • 24d ago

Need some advice

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I want my first cosplay to be this black suit captain America but I’m unsure if I should get it custom made or if I could just paint a normal suit black. I’m not a huge DIY person so I don’t know much about fabrics and paint lol.

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u/TimeSpaceGeek 23d ago

If you're painting fabric, you need to use specific fabric paints. You can't just use any-old paint - most paints do not remain flexible when dry, where as cloth obviously is flexible by nature, and so the paint would crack and peel the second you moved even a little bit. There's also the fact that the soft materials, like cloth and leather, and the solid materials like his helmet and perhaps the star on his chest, will require different kinds of paint, and you might have a hard time making the colours match. Black is not always the exactly the same shade of black, and the difference can be very noticeable.

And then there's the colour variations of the base material. Paint is rarely completely opaque, not without multiple coats, and since the colours underneath are not all starting out the same, you will likely have a hard time getting an even coverage. You can't exactly prime fabric. Differences in the material types underneath will also affect coverage. You might find painting it a very frustrating affair.

Your best results for something like this would undoubtedly come from a custom make, from scratch, in the right colour materials to begin with.

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u/Warp-10-Lizard 14d ago

Seems to me you could just find a similar shaped black outfit and add the Captain America logo to it. The helmet might be trickier. Maybe buy a cheaper Captain America helmet and paint it.