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When I started out this cosplay of Cesar Torres' Alternate from The Mandela Catalogue in late 2022, I was on a FX makeup kick. I wanted to find ways to replicate those uncanny details in real life, so the distorted, barely-shown face was an interesting challenge. I was also getting a bit more into self photography with a ring light stand I got in a gift exchange, so it was a pretty experimental project in a lot of aspects.

For the "Cesar" parts of the costume, I thrifted a suit, shirt and bowtie, got a cheap wig online to style, and found some fake roses at the dollar store to make a boutonnière out of. I also found an old corded phone, which I dissassembled as much as possible to remove its inner parts and make it as lightweight as possible to carry around.

For the Alternate elements, I created a half-mask out of Worbla molded to my face (with cling wrap to protect my skin), with steel wire attached as a support. The wire was bended to the shape of my head and around my ear, and is worn under the wig hidden from view, with a bit of skin tape to keep the whole thing in place on my face. The mask was painted with Musou Black Paint, a special type of paint made to be non-reflective and absorb light (if you're familiar with the Blackest Black / Vantablack colors, this is another similar paint.) I made two masks throughout this costume's run. The first covered a quarter of my face, with a see-through, wide cartoonish eye featuring an LED for glow using those see-through cosplay helmet LED eye blanks. The second mask was more realistic, with a solid white eye made out of moldable plastic beads, with one LED light glued inside, and ceramic fake teeth sculpted into a smile.

Overall, the experiment was mixed. The paint choice didn't quite work in real life as well as I had wished, and when I wore the costume at a convention to test it out in public, I was dripping sweat behind the mask and into my eye. Despite tricks used to have vision in the masked eye (either through mesh or tearduct holes), the vision loss was too great. The Alternate effect was underwhelming in real life.

In photos, however, the mask really came together. In low-light settings, the paint easily made the whole half of the face look flat and feature-less on camera. The more realistic eye's LED unfortunately caused glare with my phone's camera, but the whole thing looked great with the lights off. While I played a bit with editing to mess with the contrast at times, raw photos often just looked like I was, quite literally, missing part of my face to the void. The costume lent itself well to experimenting with the photography itself, too. I ended up messing around with the 3DS Camera, or trying cool angles and backlights and finding overlooked corners in the house to have fun with. Some of the best ones came about balancing flashlights and phone lights around the room to try to create odd shadows!

I'm super happy with the results. It's very much a photo-only costume, but it taught me a lot about experimenting with ideas instead of looking for tried-and-true methods to make things. While the costume has since been retired, the build process has been a big inspiration for future horror builds (Like Nullref's poseable iris), and I hope to find another interesting horror creature to portray someday that will test my brain.

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