While I’ve seen several How to Train Your Dragon costumes featuring Hiccup and Astrid, this is the first Valka cosplay I’ve spotted. The character appears in How to Train Your Dragon 2. She’s a fierce warrior and basically a dragon whisperer.

Instructables user darcy3529 was inspired to make the costume as soon as she saw the movie in the theater. Instead of crafting armor, she decided to make everything from painted fabric and foam. This allowed her to keep costs down and to use supplies she already had on hand. She used strips of fabric for almost every piece of the ensemble and painted them. It has a leather-like look. The arm gauntlets? They’re made from knee socks:

For the arm gauntlets I started with a pair of knee socks that I cut the feet off of. The socks were slipped over a cardboard tube and wrapped with quilt batting. The batting was then covered with strips of fabric and then painted with a 50/50 mixture of white glue and water. The glue was allowed to dry and then the gauntlets were painted in the same fashion as the legs of the costume.

I made similar spikes to the ones on the legs. These spikes were about 1.5 inches long. GOOP glue was used to apply these to the sides of the gauntlets.

There is a claw like hand that sticks out from the wrist. Foam from a 1/2 exercise mat was used. The foam hand was covered with masking tape, a layer of caulking , then a top coat of brown paint. The claw was glued to the wrist with GOOP glue. At the elbow area a triangular piece of armor was glued on.

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