(Cover photo @swotchnollie on Instagram)
Let’s start the school year right with a new cosplayer of the month. With a degree in digital photography, this cosplayer spends just as much time in front of the camera as she does behind it. Allow me to introduce to you; Stellalasaurus!
You’ve cosplayed about 16 characters from My Hero Academia. What is it about the show that makes you want to cosplay them all?
Oh gosh! Has it really been sixteen characters? That’s so crazy! I know a lot of people joke about how I’m on my way to cosplaying the entire cast but I guess it is more than I thought it was! Really, this show is what brought me back to watching anime and what brought me back to seriously cosplaying. I absolutely love that it has character’s that are so flawed in their humanity and that the heroes just want to do their best, however it is they can. Especially the students, they don’t know how to make the world a better place but they really really want to and that is super appealing to me! The villains are also superhuman in their villainy and that’s interesting to me, as well! I also love their designs and how interesting, but fairly easy they are! It’s like Horikoshi Kouhei and his team just knew that people would want to cosplay them and made them super, super, interesting looking!
Any advice for those trying to balance cosplay while working a full-time job?
Don’t let yourself burn out. Seriously. I still struggle with this but your mental and physical health is so, so, so important! It’s okay to take breaks or to sacrifice something for the sake of yourself, be it details or entire cosplays. You’ll have a chance to improve it or wear it again some other time. Just take care of yourself, first and foremost.
What inspires you to add song lyrics to your cosplay photos and lip-sync in cosplay?
I love, love, love the concept of ‘Lipsyncing For Your Life’ that’s in Rupaul’s Drag Race and when I saw that the cosplay community did contests for things like that? I fell in love instantly. I used and still use the Musical.ly platform as practice for hopefully one day entering one of these contests myself! Music has always been a huge part of my life and I constantly find myself making playlists or relating songs to characters so it’s really only a natural step forward for me.
In 2016 you worked in a costume shop. Did your cosplaying skills help you get that job and did you learn anything there that has helped you with your cosplay?
Yes and yes! Being a cosplayer definitely helped me there since I was able to help fellow cosplayers find things and help the store grow to accommodate cosplayers, we even started selling cosplay brand wigs while I was there and that was absolutely awesome! But I feel like I learned a lot about the special effects side from my co-workers there who were and are amazing at makeup. I wouldn’t know half of what I know now if I hadn’t worked there and I was introduced to a world of specialty makeup that I’d only seen in youtube tutorials. It was an awesome learning experience
What are your top three favorite cosplays?
All time favorites? Dr. Franken Stein from Soul Eater. I’ve cosplayed him on and off for ten years. I can’t leave him out of this list. I also absolutely adore Aizawa Shouta and Shiretoko Tomoko from Boku No Hero Academia. Tomoko was a project of love between me and my entire Wild Wild Pussycats group so I adore her and how much she reflects that group of friend’s talent, as well as my own and Shouta has just been absolutely amazing and fun to cosplay and I’ve met so many amazing friends through him that I can’t include him in this list!
If you could cosplay with any other cosplayer in a cosplay photo shoot, who would it be?
I think I always have to answer that it’d be my sibling Lex ( @matchachalatte on Instagram ) because we’re a packaged deal. I think anyone who knows us personally kinda knows that you can’t have one of us without the other. We always work on things together and there’s very rarely a moment when we’re not cosplaying character’s that go hand-in-hand – and even then we’re still from the same show.
What is one of your most memorable moments cosplaying?
Oh gosh, oh gosh! I’ve been cosplaying for nearly ten years so that’s a lot to think about. Lex and I cosplayed Merida and Rapunzel to a con and we grabbed some coffee and the baristas wrote down Merida and Punzie’s names on our cups without asking us and now as a barista myself I think that’s absolutely amazing. But we also had a set of like three year old twins come up to us at a con thinking we were the actually princesses so we immediately got into character and talked to them for like ten minutes and then a little later their parents thanked us for that because it made their kid’s happy and that was just a very sweet experience.
What is the next event we can expect to see you cosplay at?
I’ll for sure be at Kumori-con in Oregon! But I’ll probably pop in at a few local events from now until then. My co-workers really want me to attend PAX West with them … so we’ll see!
What is your advice for those just getting into cosplay?
Go at your own pace and definitely seek out tutorials on the internet! I didn’t have those when I was first starting out so it’s awesome to see how quickly someone can learn and grow nowadays! The hardest thing is how sometimes comparing yourself to others happens and really, my advice is; don’t sweat it. Just do what you can and have fun doing it! There’s no standard and if someone thinks there is? Don’t pay them any mind. Cosplay is supposed to be fun and enjoyable and an outlet for creativity, it doesn’t have to reach a certain ‘standard’ and you don’t have to stress out about it. Doing something like cosplay shouldn’t be stressful, it should be fun at the end of the day!
Where can we find you online?
I’m under ‘stellalasaurus’ on Instagram, Youtube, and Twitter! And then my Facebook Page is ‘Stellaestiel Cosplays’!
https://www.instagram.com/stellalasaurus/
https://twitter.com/stellalasaurus