Star T-Rex Cosplay

It was quite a few years ago (2012 if I'm figuring right) that I saw an online ad for a T-shirt called "Star T-Rex" which featured, of course, a drawing of dinosaurs wearing Star Trek uniforms. It cracked me up, so of course I had to purchase it (pic at right). The artist was Captain RibMan.

That was a few years before I joined my Star Trek costume group and needed to do Trek cosplay. Initially I'd thought I'd be fine with just a uniform or two, but soon I was looking for more variety. And -- you guessed it -- I was inspired by the T-shirt and started thinking about cosplaying a Star T-Rex.

This was around the time those inflatable T-Rex costumes were becoming popular, but I decided against using that as a basis for my costume, because I'd have to hand-make all the clothing, and that seemed like way too much work.

My idea was, instead, to use a uniform I already had, and then all I'd need would be a dino mask that covered my whole head. I periodically went looking online, but I had a hard time finding something that fit my needs. I finally did find something in July 2022.

The Head

The mask I got was a full head latex mask from Creepy Party. It looked pretty realistic (not like a cartoon) and it was reasonably comfortable to wear. But... it did have a weird smell to it so I propped it up on a shelf for a while to let it air out. I had enough other things to keep me busy for a while.

As it turned out, it was over a year (late 2023) before I actually got back to putting the dino costume together. Good news, though: the smell was almost totally gone. But there were a couple of things about the mask that were bothering me. One was that the teeth had been painted the same color as the rest of the face, which didn't look right. No problem, I just took out my acrylic paints and painted them white (pic at left was taken partway thru this process). Another was that the eyes looked weird. They were all yellow, with a small round pupil in the middle. The pupil looked TOO small. Again, no real problem, I took out a Sharpie marker and made a larger vertical pupil (I was inspired by Crowley from Good Omens).

I also realized that I didn't like the idea of the bottom edge of the mask just hanging out over the Trek uniform, and I wanted the neck to look like it was properly inside the collar of the shirt. So I cut off the collar area from a couple of old black T-shirts and glued it around the bottom neck of the mask to form what a friend called a "neck skirt" (pic at right). The plan was that it would serve as a "dickey" under a colored TOS shirt. Specifically, I figured this would be a great use for the TOS Shirt 1 that I had made several years ago. The neckline had turned out larger than I wanted then, but it's perfect for the dino head.

The Hands

At some point after I'd gotten the mask it had occurred to me that that wasn't all I'd need for the costume. The uniform would cover the rest of my body--except the hands. I didn't want a dino head with human hands!

So I again went looking online, but had problems finding something that I thought would meet my needs. Unlike with the head, however, I considered that I might be able to make the hands myself. I had the idea that they'd have 3 fingers, in a kind of permanent Vulcan salute (of course!) My first thought was to start with a pair of gloves and use my usual medium of papier mache' to join the fingers into the proper shape, but I quickly realized the result would be much too inflexible. I wondered how people with more experience than me might do it, but hadn't actually made an effort to research that when I stumbled on a couple of videos on YouTube about making "monster gloves" using liquid latex. The method seemed like it would work for my purposes, so even though it was something I'd never tried before, I decided to go ahead with it. And hey, learning new things is fun, right? So, I purchased some garden gloves (because the ones I already had were dirty from working in the yard) along with some liquid latex, reviewed some YouTube videos for tips and techniques working with the stuff, and got going:

1. The first thing they did in the videos was form the overall shape of the hand. They did things like extending the fingers with wire armatures that made sense for the monster hand they were making but didn't really make sense for mine. But at this point they held everything together with duct tape. So I just used duct tape to tape the fingers together into the basic shape I wanted. (In retrospect, I probably should have made more effort to avoid putting duct tape over the knuckle area; it might have enabled more flexibility in the final product.)
   

2. The next step was to cover the entire thing with masking tape. I infer this was mainly to keep the latex from soaking into the gloves, but probably also helps smooth things out before starting the latex. I made a decision to omit the latex close to the bottom edge of each glove, for comfort and neatness.
   

3. Next was applying the latex along with bits of paper towel, similar to the way you do papier mache'. I did this outside on my patio because one of the tips I'd heard about working with liquid latex was to be careful of the fumes. This process took a while, because you can only work on a limited area at a time before it gets too messy and you have to wait for it to dry.
   

4. I needed to add claws to the dino fingers so they wouldn't look weird. This seemed a good opportunity to get use from something I had but never thought I'd use: a set of plastic glue-on fingernails that someone had gifted me quite a while back. I picked out the 6 largest ones and filed off the corners so they wouldn't look too squared off. Then I used the latex like glue to help attach them.
   

5. The gloves being basically done, the next step was to paint. But first, I needed to wait for the latex to cure. As usual, I had plenty of other things to keep me busy, so it was about 3 months before I actually got back to it. Before I left off, the latex was a uniform light beige, and, although it was "dry", it didn't feel dry--I'm not sure how to describe it. Not wet, or sticky, but still somewhat weird, even for rubber. In any case, by the time I was ready to start painting (May 2024) the latex was much dryer to the touch, and, interestingly, had started turning brown (leftmost of the 2 pics at right). I'd already painted the fingernails with black nail polish, and I considered that my dino hands wouldn't look completely wrong if I didn't paint the latex skin at all... but of course they'd look better if I did. Again, this was going to take some time, because I was painting with acrylics and felt a need to do it with light coats. My first one was a black wash overall (rightmost of the pics at right). The plan was to make them an overall brown that made them look like they were from the same animal as the head, with the "palms" lighter than the backs, some color variation/weathering to make them look more realistic, and maybe some scales???
   

6. After several paint passes, I finally finished the gloves to my satisfaction. I also added some velcro pieces on the cuffs to make sure they stayed inside the sleeves when worn.

Results

I got a chance to put it together at Supercon in July 2024. Not surprisingly, I couldn't wear it for more than about 2 hours at a stretch, because it would get annoyingly moist inside the latex mask. But a nice thing about this cosplay is that it's easy enough to remove the mask and hands and still look ok as a human in the uniform. Another unsurprising problem was that I had limited vision inside the mask, which meant I needed a "handler" if I was going to walk around very much, so mostly I stayed close to the Star Trek booth. But I had a lot of fun interactions with people, and I think the costume was well-received. I was very happy with it. One pic below:

But my favorite thing happened after I posted pics on Facebook. I had tagged Captain RibMan (the artist who did the inspiration T-shirt) on one, and he shared it to his page saying he was "honored and giddy", which led to these further comments:

Return to main Cosplay page

   Return home