Sylveon Cosplay Ears Tutorial

A friend of mine wanted to cosplay Sylveon for an upcoming convention we were attending and asked for my help. As I love making cosplay props and helping others, I worked on making the ears for her and photographed the process for this tutorial to help others. This tutorial ended up a bit longer than expected so bear with me :)

What you’ll need:

- Craft foam: I had about three sheets lying around that were $1 each and I bought a huge roll at Michael’s for $8

- Scissors

- Hot Glue Gun and a lot of refill sticks

- Pen and Pencil

- Acrylic Paint: You’ll need white, pink, two types of blues (a lighter one and a medium one), and a light teal/seafoam.

- Three Pieces of Sandpaper: I believe mine were a 75, a 100, and a 150

- Headband: I recommend the stiff kind that is covered in fabric. You can buy a three pack at Walmart for about $4

The Process:

Step One: Pattern Making

The first thing you need to do is draw out your pattern with pencil on paper. I just Googled a picture of Sylveon and used that as my reference picture. Once you have it drawn, cut out the pattern.

Step Two: Making the Foam Shapes

Now you’re going to trace your pattern onto the craft foam with a ballpoint pen (pencil tends to tear the foam). You’ll need: two of the little hair piece, four of the full ears, and two of the full ears with the center cut out. After you have outlined all of your pieces, cut them out of the foam. I trimmed along the sharp edges of the back of the piece on the bottom of each stack in the second picture, the front of the top piece, and the front of one hair piece and the back of the other to round out all of the edges for sanding.

Step Three: Gluing

I don’t have a picture for this step, but it’s easy to understand. You need to take your hot glue and glue together the two full ear pieces with the rounded edge at the back and glue the two hair pieces so the rounded edges face out. A word of caution: foam can warp with the heat of the glue gun so just try and smooth it out the best you can.

Step Four: Sanding

Now you’re going to sand all of the edges that you rounded before. BE CAREFUL! The sandpaper (especially the roughest) will tear the foam, so sand lightly. Start with your roughest (the smallest number) and then use the middle size and then finish with the smoothest paper.

Step Five: Paint it Pink

You’re going to paint the very front and sides of the ear (the two pieces with the center cut out on the right) and the back and sides of the two pieces you glued together earlier. You’ll also paint both sides of the little hair piece. Leave the front of the glued pieces blank, you’ll be painting them later. Also, foam tends to absorb the paint so it will take quite a few layers to cover the foam fully. I think I used about six layers. Let this paint dry.

Step Six: Painting the Blue

For this step, I mixed a medium blue and a light blue until I was happy with how it matched Sylveon. This will be the “inside” of the ear. Most of this will be covered by the front piece so don’t worry about having perfect edges while you’re painting. Let this dry before you move on.

Step Seven: Some More Gluing

First off, I apologize for the terribly picture quality, the lighting wasn’t great so the picture came out a bit orange. For this step, you’re going to glue the front piece over what you just painted blue. Again, the foam will slightly warp with the heat and stay that way once it’s cooled so work fast to smooth it out.

Step Eight: Bow and Ribbons

Now you’re going to make a pattern and cut out the bow and ribbons (ribbons not pictured). For these you only need one layer, so you’ll end up with one foam bow and two foam ribbons. The center of the bow matches the pink of the ear and the stripes on the ribbons are light teal/seafoam, blue that matches the inner ear, and pink.

Step Nine: Assembly

Finally, you’re going to hot glue everything together. The bow is glued to the left ear with a little space left on the sides to slide the end of the ribbon under. The ears are then glued to the headband. I positioned them similar to how I saw them pictured when I was Googling reference pictures. Last but not least, slide the end of each ribbon under the bow and position to your liking. As you can see, I wrapped one up around the right ear and glued and the other is just slightly folded and glued to the side of the headband.