Chell — Portal 2
Who doesn’t love the Portal series? After clocking in 300+ hours over 12 years on Steam alone, I figured it was time for me to finally cosplay Chell.
Chell’s original design in Portal was purely form following function: she’s one of thousands of test subjects, and she looks like it. In Portal 2, she’s given a bit more personality through her design, helping her stand out as the one subject to break free of the tyrannical GLaDOS. Despite this being a redesign in a sequel, the Portal 2 design is definitely the fan favorite and more visually interesting of the two.
Easy things first: the jumpsuit. With me making everything from scratch for Cinder Fall, Chell was supposed to be a relatively easy, low-sew costume, which of course did not work out. I started by ordering a pair of orange coveralls from Amazon, carefully sorting through tons of options to find one in the necessary shade of burnt orange. When my coveralls arrived, I was pleasantly surprised to find them a lovely shade of neon orange, giving less “scientific test subject” and more “escaped convict”. I could’ve bleached/dyed them into a more appropriate shade, but I also didn’t love the fit, I decided to return them and just sew my own jumpsuit. After tracking down a women’s boiler suit pattern by Our Lady of Leisure and some woven cotton in an appropriate shade of orange, I threw together a base jumpsuit in an afternoon, keeping my sleeves ridiculously long for tying purposes and opting for a zipper instead of buttons, since this part of the jumpsuit would be undone and tied around my waist anyway. The end result was….not great.
I ran into the same problem I had with the Amazon coveralls: tying the top half of the jumpsuit around the waist was just uncomfortably bulky. It didn’t add much aesthetically and made using the included hip pockets and added zipper back pockets impossible. The upside, however, of making all of your own cosplay pieces is that you can tailor them to fit your own preferences and needs, so I decided to nix the top half entirely and just elasticate a new waistband instead. The end result was much more functional and less bulky. Finishing touches included some knee patches, made out of the same fabric dyed a more red-orange to stand out, and elasticating the legs.
Moving onto the upper half, I grabbed a white ribbed tank top from my local Ross and used my Silhouette Cameo with an existing PDF of the Aperture logo to cut out the logo onto heat transfer vinyl. I then cropped the tank top and ironed the decal on. For the blue/grey underlayers, I figured the easiest way to get the effect would be to make a pair of grey hot pants, a blue racerback tank, and just sew them together at the waist to make one easy bodysuit. Both the hot pants and racerback tank were quickly patterned off existing clothing items I already owned.
With all the clothing done, it was time for the most intimidating challenge: The Longfall Boots.
I have, no exaggeration, been thinking about how to make a pair of Longfall Boots since 2012. I wanted a pair before I even started cosplaying! (Real ones remember the knee high Converse pair that still show up pretty high in Google search results.) Portal 2 has been out for 13 years now, so cosplayers of all skill levels have had plenty of time to figure out how to hack it, myself included. After making a few pairs of ridiculous shoes over the years, I felt relatively confident in my ability to bring these to life.
Many cosplayers have come up with different ways to get the floating heel look of the original Longfall Boots, including building atop a pair of heelless shoes, welding stainless steel strips in place of a heel, and reinforcing the spine and sole of a shoe with a flattened PVC pipe. My galaxy brain plan was to build them over top a pair of shoes with clear heels, similar to how to fine folks at Punished Props have done in the past. It’s not my first rodeo, so when I picked up a pair of black booties with a chunky clear heel, I made sure to wear them around the house to ensure I would be able to comfortably wear them all day at the con. I was excited to show off both my first build in a few years and my love for the Portal series, so I didn’t want to finish these and discover they were too uncomfortable to wear for long periods!
Once I declared my shoes Officially Comfortable™, I made a pattern by wrapping my shoes, feet, and calves in plastic wrap, then painter’s tape. I cut myself free, stuffed the weird shell I’d created with leftover plastic grocery bags, and got to work marking out my lines. The actual model for the Longfall Boots includes many convenient seam lines, so I focused on transferring these as accurately as possible to my masking tape pattern. My plan was to use 5mm and 2mm foam for the white parts, and the preexisting black of the base shoes for the toes and heels.
After cutting out and transferring my masking tape pattern onto paper, I cut out all my pieces onto craft foam — 5mm for the back of the calf (for structure) and the overlap on the front (for some dimension), 2mm for the “under” pieces across the front of the ankle and the top of the shoe (for flexibility and to keep things from getting too bulky). I cleaned up my top and back seams using Kwik Seal and rounded out the edges on my 5mm foam with a Dremel. White spray Plasti-Dip was used to prime my black foam, and I used a few coats of Angelus White to complete the paint job. All that was left was to superglue these bad boys to my base shoes and wear them!
Except I did happen to forget a crucial fact of foam: it doesn’t stretch. Like, at all. (Shocking, right?) So if the hole around the ankle isn’t big enough for your feet, you won’t be able to get them on at all. That sure is a fun fact that I had to be reminded of the hard way!
So after taking too many pictures of the work I was so proud of, I had to sit down and figure out how I was going to make these work. I had initially wanted to put a zipper in the back seam, but talked myself out of it during assembly because I didn’t think it was necessary and wanted a nice seamless look in the back. (Hot tip: If you too put zippers in the back seam of every other pair of boots you make, keep doing that! It works for a reason!) I had a lot of leftover white neoprene from a Halloween costume, so for the hell of it, I cut out a piece and tried facing and understitching it to see what kind of effect it would have. I was pleasantly surprised to find it gave the same appropriately futuristic look as the foam! I had no back up plan, so I jumped into transferring all of my patterns onto my neoprene, adding in a now necessary seam allowance.
Turning my foam pattern into a fabric pattern ended up being easier than expected. Raw edges toward the toe and the heel were faced and understitched to keep everything in place, while the front ankle piece was fully lined and also understitched. The upper calf part was mostly lined, with the lining cutting off around the ankle. Lining the calf allowed me to sneak the front elastic into the seam, so I could avoid all topstitching. To create the brace, black nylon webbing was sewn onto the calves, with the bottom being superglued at the base of the heels. My boot covers were finally superglued onto my base shoes, and were finally (actually!) wearable.
Unfortunately, I clearly didn’t test my base shoes as well I should have, because I realized after arriving at the convention that these base shoes are actually terrible. I ended up spending most of the day in my Tevas, changing only into my Longfall Boots for pictures and carrying them over my arm the rest of the time. (Why does this feel familiar?) However, courtesy of Mikey, I did still manage to get some great shots of the whole look. The next iteration will definitely be built on better shoes with better insoles, along with some interfacing inside the calf pieces and probably a more sturdy material for the braces. Maybe by then, Thea and I will have built a Portal gun…
