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After having worn Karkat Vantas a few times, I was itching to try my hand at another Homestuck cosplay. My favorite character was Dave Strider, but I felt the human characters were easier to cosplay than the trolls, and it didn't sound enticing to make the same type of costume again without some of the cool accessories like the horns. At some point I figured out other people were cosplaying Davesprite, a version of the character I enjoyed a lot, and I was thus exposed to the concept of different interpretations online (as some people went for a full orange design like some of the webcomic's fully drawn panels, while others tried to recreate the sprite with mostly white feathers and orange tips). I wanted to do his wings proportional to real life, something I hadn't really seen yet. I wanted to do something novel; it's something that is still true today, though now I understand that what I really enjoy isn't necessarily the character's rarity itself, but rather the challenge of uncharted crafting territories. (Whether or not it's visibly novel to others isn't as relevant nowadays, unless the root of the reason something's not been done yet is "How do you even turn a worm Pokémon into a fursuit?", for instance.)

For Davesprite, I wanted my cosplay to look like his fully orange depiction in the "[S] Cascade" animation (I was there when this thing released and killed like three hosting websites. It was awesome.) Throughout the build, however, I had to make some adjustments due to materials; I couldn't find an orange wig in the right style, so I settled for yellow, and I couldn't find large orange feathers, so I settled for red ones. I ended up buying red converse shoes to try to tie the red feathers together a bit more cohesively with the costume. I could also never find orange sunglasses in the right shade, so I just got some regular black ones instead.

Things started out similar to previous projects; purchasing the regular clothing elements (including the orange shirt and a long feather boa for the neck fluff.) For the other elements, my dad was, once again, a huge help: for the waist bandages, we picked up some broadcloth at the fabric store, ripped some strips of fabrics, and used heat-activated adhesive to attach them to a sash-like base. We then glued velcro strips to make it close in the back and I painted the neon yellow blood on. I also quickly build a sword out of papier maché as a prop.

The wings were the biggest challenge of the build. My dad built a base shape out of chicken wire and copper tubing and attached them to a harness made out of more chicken wire. The harness was covered in batting for comfort and outfitted with a snap in the front to tighten it on the body properly. The wings were then covered with orange fleece, and I then spent hours carefully trimming and gluing individual feathers to the wings. It took... a lot of time. I burnt myself with hot glue quite a bit! The shirt was cut at the base of each wing all the way down, with two spots of velcro added to close the shirt back up. The cut was very rough, but thanks to the bandages this was completely hidden and allowed me to easily take everything on and off in layers.

Wearing Davesprite at a con taught me a lot about the concept of a project post-mortem. Though I have nothing but fond memories of the experience in the end, a lot of things went wrong with the costume. This was the first time I had an encumbering costume, and I hadn't accounted for how hard it would be to navigate around with the wings. People bumped into me so often despite the much smaller crowds of 2012 that the larger wing's copper tubing snapped in half (and the sword too, somehow.) I couldn't sit down in this costume either, so when I came back from my first convention with it, I realized that, while impressive, this cosplay was best shelved; it couldn't withstand convention activities. It was the first time I'd had major costume issues, and the first time I took my experiences in consideration to plan out future projects. I'm still hesitant of ideas that include large fragile elements sticking out far away from my body, and one of my first concern when I pick a costume to this day start with asking questions like "is my movement impacted?", or "can I remove enough layers within 30 seconds to go to the bathroom solo?" As you might gather, Davesprite did not pass those tests.

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