With both Zombie Day and Halloween drawing closer, you’re going to need some gruesome wounds, stat! I hinted at my own wound-making recipes in a past post, but now all shall be revealed!

My favorite way to make nasty-looking wounds is with unflavored gelatin. It doesn’t necessarily have to be unflavored; if you want your wound to have different colors from flavored gelatin that’s up to you! (You should bear in mind though, that colored gelatin will probably stain your skin.) The great thing about this method is that you can use various additional media to create many different textures, and you don’t need any special glue to attach the wound to your skin. Just glob it onto you while it’s still wet and let it dry on you; it will stick by itself.

Take some cotton balls and get them wet with hot water. Stir it around to sort of break them up. Add the gelatin. How much you add isn’t that important, it will just make the texture a little different, so you can experiment. It’s better to add too much than too little, because without enough gelatin, the cosmetic won’t solidify or stick to you.

Once you have the gelatin stirred in and it’s cooled down enough to handle, glob it onto your skin and sculpt it with your fingers so that it looks how you want it to. The cotton balls give it kind of a fibrous, lumpy texture. Once the wound has dried and solidified, you can add makeup to it. Paint it to match your skin tone, then add blood, bruise colors, or whatever other colors you need. You can stick in things like pins, bolts, or other hardware, fake eyeballs like in the awesome droopy-eye wound shown above, fake knives or other costume props, or sew big uneven stitches into it.

When you’ve finished with your creepy shenanigans, the wound will peel off with a little effort, or you can try dissolving it off with water.

You don’t have to use just cotton balls, either. Try using corn flakes, tissues or toilet paper, shredded paper, or anything else you want to experiment with! All of these media will give you different textures, so think about how you want your wound to look before you make it. You can even try mixing different media together.

Similar types of wounds can be made with latex glue, or liquid latex that’s safe for use on skin, instead of gelatin. That might not be as cheap, but it depends on what’s available to you. Here’s an Instructable for using latex and toilet paper. It will also give you some good ideas about shaping wounds and creating additional, realistic textures.

You can also make great wounds using marshmallows. Just mash up some marshmallows with your fingers, and shape them to the size you want. These ones are cool because they remain soft and gushy while still maintaining basically the same shape. You should mostly paint them and decorate them before you put them on, and you have to glue them on with latex glue or spirit gum. Once they are glued on to your skin you can add some of the messier effects like blood.

Speaking of blood, I’ve given this recipe before, but it bears reiteration. It’s simple! Just mix together corn syrup with enough red food coloring to get the shade of red you desire. Common additional ingredients are cocoa powder to make it darker and to give it a realistic brownish color when it dries, peanut butter to make it thicker, or liquid soap to make it slimier.

What I have yet to figure out or find is a recipe for realistic-looking fake pus. On the other hand, maybe that’s just a bit too gross.

As a bonus, here’s some instructions from Indy Mogul on how to make a fake brain!

Harry Potter characters continue to be a very popular choice this Halloween. But for people who want their costume to be extra awesome, I’ve found this tutorial on Instructables about how to make a wand that lights up at the tip! Everyone else with their plain-old-boring wands will be totally jealous!

This is where you can find the instructable.

The basic premise is that you build a wand with a LED in the tip, and a simple circuit connecting it to a battery and a switch. You can turn the light on and off whenever you need to–but be sure to say the spells Lumos and Nox when you do it! It’s simple and brilliant.

Halloween is less than two months away! I hope you’ve all started to prepare. Just in case you can’t think of anything, here’s a short list of what I think will be popular costumes this year.

The Joker

Admittedly, there will still be a number of Batmans running around, especially among the younger folk, but it’s clear to see that the Joker was the real attraction of the film Dark Knight, and I’ve already seen Joker costumes popping up all over the place, for events like the movie premiere and conventions. Undoubtedly a fair amount of these will be used for Halloween too. Some of them are amazingly accurate, all the way down to the green hair and smudged, worn makeup.

For the Joker, you will need a long purple coat, a light purple suit jacket, a green vest, a reptile print shirt, purple pinstripe pants, a green camouflage print tie, black shoes, and multi-colored socks (try finding Mardi Gras socks for that). Good luck! For makeup you’ll need some kind of temporary green hair dye (it’s probably more like hair paint), white cream makeup base, red makeup for the mouth, black makeup for the eyes, and brown makeup for creating the shadows and basically helping to smudge and dirty up the makeup job.

There are plenty of tutorials for making Joker costumes online. If you can’t sew, that’s not a problem! You can buy clothing at thrift stores that are similar to the style you need, but light in color, and then simply dye them purple or green. This article on Associated Content gives pretty good instructions for it.

Dr. Horrible

It’s not just us here at My Disguises who are obsessed with the bad doctor. Even though it’s been difficult for costumers to get the costume items they need to make an accurate Dr. Horrible costume, we know that they will do whatever it takes to get out there on Halloween night with all that mad scientist style.

We’ve posted previously about what’s needed in a Dr. Horrible costume, and there is plenty of fan discussion over at drhorrible.net.

But what if you want to show your love for this phenomenon, without looking like everyone else? If you’re a girl you can put together a Penny outfit. Why not go as Billy, Captain Hammer, or even better, choose another villain from the Evil League of Evil? My personal favorite is Dead Bowie, but you can choose for yourself. This post on cruftbox.com has a rundown of all the ELE characters, including screenshots of all of them.

Pirates

Even though there hasn’t been a big pirating film out this year, I think it’s safe to assume that everyone still loves pirates, and they will be strong contenders at Halloween for a few more years yet.

The great thing about pirate costumes is that you don’t have to base your costume on a specific character (unless, of course, you want to). They can be as fancy or as simple as you like, and you can make a costume for males and females.

The most simple, pared down basics for a pirate costume is a puffy shirt, and baggy pants, or a skirt for the girls, if desired, and a sash to tie around your waist or head. From there, you can go on to add hats or bandanas, fancy pirate coats, vests, corsets for the girls, big boots, fat leather belts, jabots, weapons, lots of jewelry, and any other piratey accessory! Make sure to decorate things with skulls and crossbones—I found some awesome silver skull and crossbones buttons at a fabric store the other day.

If you’re thinking about historically accurate pirate costumes, I’ve found that the Pirates of the Caribbean films are actually pretty good references, and corroborate a lot of the research I’ve done on the period (mid-to-late 1700s); with the exception of most of Elizabeth’s costumes, and some of the more obviously fantasy-based costumes. Of course, you can do your own research by searching online or checking out fashion history books.

And while I’m on the topic, let’s give another reminder that Talk Like a Pirate Day is just a few days away! We’ll hear more from FunkyLady on that soon.

Previously we posted about Flight of the Conchords and the zany costumes they come up with for their music videos. But they’re not the only band that dresses up for fun!

I don’t know how many of you are familiar with wizard rock. It’s a genre that promotes literacy and fighting evil by rocking out to Harry Potter-based music. There’s much more to wizard rock that I can really cover in a pithy sentence, but what I’m really here to talk about, of course, is the costuming. Part of what makes it so awesome is that everyone can dress up. The bands dress as characters from the books, the fans dress up as witches and wizards, and even the instruments get costumes!

Music, Harry Potter, and costumes—all in one! It’s too good to be true!

Brothers Joe and Paul DeGeorge wear Harry Potter costumes for their band, Harry and the Potters. The two of them created their band, and wizard rock, in 2002.

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Sometimes, a costume is more than just the clothes you wear. Sometimes, a costume is less than just the clothes you wear.

Makeup is something we haven’t talked too much about around here. That’s because makeup is usually an accessory to the costume, something that finishes the costume to make it more complete. It’s not often that a costume is defined by the makeup alone—but sometimes, it can be.

The brilliance behind zombie costumes is that you can wear whatever you want—or just whatever you normally wear. If you had really turned into a zombie, that’s what you would be wearing. As far as costumes go, it’s about as simple as it comes. It’s the makeup that’s really the costume.

To be a zombie, you’ll need pallid, sickly-looking skin. Maybe with a bit of a greenish tint to it. You’ll need at least one wound—that’s the zombie bite that turned you. And if you want to be really dramatic, blood splatters are the way to go.

Fake blood can be easily made by mixing corn syrup with red food coloring. Adding a little cocoa powder to the concoction will give it a darker blood color and ensure that when it dries, it will look just like dried blood.

Making your wounds takes a little more work, but it’s so much more fun. There are plenty of recipes for this kind of thing. I’ve done it with cotton balls and gelatin. I have a friend who made amazing realistic-looking zombie wounds with marshmallows. You can experiment with other textures too, like tissue or corn flakes. The wounds can be glued on with latex (the kind they use in theater to attach fake beards and the like), and painted with makeup and fake blood.

You don’t have to wait until Halloween to do this, either. Grab some friends and make a fast and fun zombie film. Or better yet, participate in one of the many zombie walks that occur every year across the country! Zombiewalk.com is a good resource for finding one, or organize your own in your neighborhood.

Most people don’t think of Memorial Day as a great costuming event. What are you doing to do, go to a graveyard dressed in black? But if you’re a Civil War re-enactor, you feel a little differently about this holiday!

At Greenwich Village in Michigan, there is an event this weekend called Civil War Remembrance. It’s an awesome opportunity to learn more about this tumultuous time in America’s history. There are events and exhibitions regarding all facets of life at the time, as well as concerts and re-enactment shows! But what caught my eye, of course, was the costuming.

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Obviously we like any new take on costumes and the fun associated. Earlier on we reviewed Project Rooftop, our totally favorite superhero costume blog. Dean Trippe really has the system down, and his work is fantastic.

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Since our last Steampunk article, we noticed some focus and attention. The Steampunk lovers are true to the spirit of DIY and costumes.
Now bloggers are uniting to bring them up to status with a recent Steampunk blog carnival. In essence, a blog carnival is when a chosen topic focuses on bringing all the blog posts on the subject into one place for a time. It also inspires people to get writing, creating, sharing, and motivating. This is perfect for the Steampunk community.

Walking the Berkshires hosts a great blog carnival every month or so called “Cabinet of Curiosities”. In this fifth edition, they are highlighting Steampunk in all of its clever details. In fact, it’s better than anything we’ve ever done on the topic, and we can admit it. It’s worth a look.

While there are some great links, we’re mostly interested in the Steampunk costumes and where to go to find out more about them. Here’s what we gathered from the carnival…

• Aether Emporium has an excellent page on Steampunk fashion, where to find it, how to do it, and all the in betweens.
• They also share The Heliograph, a blog with some great Steampunk fashion inspiration.
• The carnival features these gloves mapping London, suggesting a fine point of fashion for Steampunk ladies.

And a few links of our own…

• Social shopping site Kaboodle has some suggestions for Steampunk fashion, always necessary for the costume basis.
• Here’s a great link with some full Steampunk costumes, showing the ensemble look.
• If you’re having a hard time finding a place to get some Steampunk gear that you don’t have to make from scratch, Buysteampunk.com is a good start. Eventually, you’ll want to make it your own though.

Now I know what blog carnivals are good for. It’s nice to know that there’s enough people out there interested in Steampunk to participate in a gathering of good info like this. We’ll dive in more as time goes on, but hopefully that’s enough linking to keep you at your computer for awhile.