Hey everyone! So I'm finally back to blogging. Life has surely been hectic and if you've been following me via Instagram and Twitter.. you'd surely know that yes, I have been out and about... but also that life has been incredibly stressful. The private life has been almost unbearable and there has been intense amounts of distressing drama. Nonetheless, thank you to all of you who have been following me all this time and keeping up to date on me and my sanity! I really, really appreciate all of you.. even if I can't find the guts in myself to tell you guys that.
Now, onto the post of the day! Actually, there'll be several posts today just so that I can try to catch up with my usual pace but this is going to be my .. featured post of the day! So if you've been following me via Instagram or Twitter you might have gotten updates that I made the famous Fish Pie from Studio Ghibli's amazing Kiki's Delivery Serivce!
Now, if you guys have seen the actual photo of the fish pie that I've made.. you can tell that it doesn't even look remotely the same and that has a lot to do with the time frame that I was working in. In the end, I was still carrying my fish pie around with me when it wasn't even 100% dry. If you plan on making this yourself, please make sure to keep that in mind! Drying time goes over a full 12 hours if you're doing it the way that I had.
So what I had decided on using as the main ingredient for this dish an amazing thing that my friend Elise had shared with me a while ago. Expanding foam. This foam is usually for filling in any gaps and cracks that you have in your home or for insulating for cheap. You can buy from your local home and hardware store, and when I mean for cheap.. I mean you can get a whole ton out of one can for just $4(including tax). Or well.. that's how much mine costed. I used what Elise had recommended for me; Great Stuff. Early heads up, this is a one time use product as it dries fairly fast. You want to make sure that you use up all of the product at once so that you get the most for your money.
But moving on! You want to make sure to follow all the instructions on the can properly. Shake the can well for the amount of time listed, be aware of the distance, be aware of the amount that you're putting in... you know things that I didn't really do!
Once the nozzle is on, just spray it like so in the container you have chosen. I was originally going to use a ceramic dish container... but I had faced more time and financial problems that made me think twice.
Now... if you're like me and you have nowhere else to put the remaining foam inside the container... then simply keep piling overtop! At some point it'll all dry up.. I'm sure. As a warning though, because you're doing this inside a closed container, you should give it WAYYYY more time to dry than I had. I gave it the basic 8 hours which led to some problems. The top and the surrounding edges were completely dry.. there was no doubt about that.. but the bottom and the insides of the container were still incredibly wet. They needed WAY more time to dry or at least a place for it to escape and allow air through. So what I did was that I ended up carving out the top part with my knife once it was dry to let there be a space for air to come through.
This is how much it ended up becoming. And once the top was dry, I stabbed small holes into the bottom of the pan to let air through so that the parts there also dried. In total, actual drying time was around 10 or 11 hours..
Once everything was mostly good, I started carving as I was running out of time! I didn't decide on using a stencil and I hadn't followed the exact look of the fish pie like I should have (BAD ME. BAD.) due to the time limit and I just straight jumped into the carving... thinking "I got this!".
And if you're doing this like how I am... then you'll also run straight into this problem too. You carved away too much and now you need to fix your mess! So just hot glue some foam on little by little until you reach your desired look. Warning: make sure you don't try to carve right into that after.. your blade will hate you.
After I had finished my carving and touching up everything, I had gone straight into the painting process. I would have liked to do a paper clay coating or to fill in any of the holes with a speckle... but I was definitely lacking in time. So.. I had decided that I wasn't going to do that much painting for the piece as I had picked the foam that looked as close to the color of a baked good.
So I had outlined the fish pie with Tulip's chocolate brown puffy paint and then took one of my angled brushes to soften it out.
Once that was dry, I took some different colors of acrylic paint to give the food more color that I was trying to achieve like in the picture... but I was working mostly with the basic browns, a white, a pumpkin orange, and a sunny yellow...and I have about 20 minutes left on the clock. I did the best that I could in the amount of time that I had and I took one of my larger brushes and started shading like my life depended on it... albeit I am still unsatisfied with the finished product.
Lastly, I came back to it with the puffy paint to give it the outline look that I really loved and in frustration, I called it a day! I should have let the coat of shading dry a little longer before I had jumped straight into the outlining, but I hadn't due to the time restraint.
In the very end, the entire piece took 5 more hours to dry than I had expected it to (I anticipated 3 hours!) but it makes sense. I'm glad that most people assumed that the fish pie was actually real as it gave them a reason to not try to touch it or eat it. Just.. my overall warning to anyone who thinks they might want to try this should definitely give themselves a week in advance before doing this. It'll save you a lot of trouble and free you from headaches.
The costs to produce this is fairly cheap too. For myself, the cost of the entire cosplay was in the ballpark of $13 at most. I had bought the expanding foam for $4, the tin was just an old thing that we had laying around the house (and if you don't have that, the 99 cents store and your local dollar stores should sell them for at most $1), some acrylic paints (if you go to your local Walmart, Michael's, Joann's, or whatever store that's near you that sells acrylic/craft paints, it shouldn't total up to anything more than $5 or $6 for the colorway that you need for this project), and the puffy paint (which you don't really have to use either! just use any of the acrylics that you like the best; this is just what I had laying around and it had a fine tip so it was simply easier for me to use).
And now.. that's a wrap for this post! I hope I did an okay job explaining this to you guys. I know it isn't exactly "tutorial" worthy and that it's more my "step by step/process", but I just want others to know that making the baked goods in Kiki's Delivery Service is a fairly simple and affordable option!
Especially because... I know everyone kind of bags on cosplayers who decide on cosplaying as Kiki because her cosplay is so simple... so it'd be cool to bring some really awesome props aside from the regular broom, radio-thiny, and your friendly little Jiji.
By the way! If any of you do decide on making the fish pie, please remind yourself that time is a huge factor in this project! But I'm sure that anyone who decides to do this and really puts in the time along with way more effort than I did, it'd be so much better! If you do decide on making it, please share it with me!! I'd love to see it and feature you with it on my feed. You could drop me a link in the comments, DM me on Instagram, tag me in the photo, email me, or whatever might suit you best! All in all, thank you for reading through and I hope you all the best!
Bye bye~
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