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meganmakesthings

Dr. Zia Rodriguez

from Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

I took some other pictures, but this is the only one I'm really comfortable sharing without a lot of editing

I wasn't planning on making a costume for Halloween this year. But then my wife and I were watching Jurassic World 2 and Zia just looked like such an easy character to cosplay!


For reference, she's this character:

The first challenge in cosplaying Zia was that there are basically no pictures of her online. Often when I cosplay, I find one or two really good pictures of the character, and just basically make things based off those. But if you Google her, all you get are close-up photos of her face (and one screenshot of a YouTube video circling and pointing at her boobs :/).

Fortunately, we had literally just watched Jurassic World 2 when I decided to cosplay her, and I still had the video rented on Google Play, so I just went to the video on my laptop and screenshotted pretty much all her scenes until I had every angle. I could post all those here but then I might feel like a stalker.


The next challenge was finding the t-shirt. I found one on Redbubble, but it wasn't exactly right. It didn't have words embroidered on the sleeves or a black outline on the collar and sleeves. You could get it with a black edge, but then the entire sleeves would be black. I decided to tweet the Redbubble artist to see if I could get anything closer to the actual design:

congratulations, you now know my twitter handle

Sounds like she had the same issue I did but worse. Thanks again, Molly, for making all this possible :)


I ended up getting the Redbubble t-shirt in gold.

I added black bias tape to the collar and sleeve edges. I tried sewing words on the sleeves, but I neither had the tools nor the skill to do so (on the night before Halloween).

If you're curious, the words are "love" (on the left arm):

57:08

and "prosperity" (on the right arm):

56:28

Next, I needed the rest of her clothing and accessories.


I got these pink glasses. Honestly, they're way too big on my face. If I wasn't in a time crunch (I watched Jurassic World 2 about two and a half weeks before Halloween), I would have updated my glasses prescription and gotten a legit pair of glasses from somewhere cheap like Zenni Optical. I'm due for a new glasses prescription anyway. But I didn't feel like searching around a lot for ones that would actually fit my face really well, and my wife was also planning on wearing this costume to a Halloween party we were going to, so I just stuck with the clear non-prescription ones.


I got these ear cuffs and these clip-on earrings because I have no intention of piercing my ears, especially not for a costume. I used one of the plain metal cuffs, both of the second-smallest earrings, and one of the smallest earrings, because Zia has two earrings and a cuff on her left ear and only one earring on her right ear. The cuff is easy to put on and relatively comfortable while it's on, but it's really hard and painful to take off :/

my Snapchat the night the accessories arrived

I found the exact model of the watch that she wears in the movie! Someone made a reddit post asking about it. It's a Swatch Piste Noire SUSW407. The watch is last year's model and isn't in production anymore, but I found the watch on ebay from seller gear_fair. I ordered it, but it never arrived and they eventually gave me a refund. I figured it might be nice to have a really nice analog watch for when my Pebble does eventually die, but it's ok that I didn't end up getting it :/

I did end up buying the Daytone watchface by Leon Felipe for my Pebble (99¢), with settings set to look like Zia's watchface:






The watchface has a 24-hour free trial, but I used up my trial finding the watchface beforehand.

Added a white watchband I already had, and my watch was complete! I could have attempted to use my Pebble Round, but I thought the bulkier Time made more sense for Zia.

Also, for those who are like "What? Pebble? Isn't that dead? My Pebble doesn't connect to anything anymore :(", get yourself on Rebble! We'll have Pebble servers as long as the actual watch hardware holds up!


I also bought a bunch of pairs of green cargo pants and belts on Amazon with free returns so I could pick which ones I liked and return the rest.


The next step was making her tattoos!

Did you know that you can print your own temporary tattoos? I just learned this pretty recently. All you need is your design, some tattoo paper, and a printer! I ordered some tattoo paper on Amazon and started work on Zia's tattoos!


I am not very good at drawing, and I know basically nothing about graphic design, so this was the more difficult aspect of the costume.

Zia has one major tattoo on her right arm, and two smaller ones on the inside of her right arm that you can just barely see in one shot. She also has "Semper Fi" written at the base of her neck, and something skeletal-looking on the side of her neck.


The skeletal one I ignored because it was just barely in one shot and I couldn't find any clip art that looked anything like it and it wasn't something I could easily draw myself. It's possible that it's a continuation of her arm tattoo? Here's a screenshot if you want to attempt to make it yourself:

57:31

I split the major arm tattoo into two sections - the DNA strand on her forearm and the scales/leaf on her upper arm. I was confident enough that I could draw both of those, so I drew them in pencil on paper, had my wife help me decide when they looked good, then traced over the pencil lines with ink. I scanned them before tracing with ink in case I messed up, so I wouldn't have to start all over again!

For the maple leaf, I actually traced a fake maple leaf fall decoration I had lying around the house. The rest was all freehand (I did use a ruler to make sure the DNA twists were even, but I thought everything else would look better if I didn't stick to ruler-straight lines).

Here's what I ended up with! Note that if you want to use these images yourself, you'll have to reverse them before printing them on tattoo paper. The left arm of the DNA strand is supposed to connect to the right swoosh on the base of the scales, and the right arm sticking out of the scales is supposed to connect to the right arm of the DNA strand:






























For the dinosaur head-looking tattoo, I did some Googling for dinosaurs with elongated heads, and stumbled upon this image:

Its head looks a lot like the head of the beast on her arm!

34:30 if you're wondering

That's a Xiongguanlong, which lived in what is now China. I Googled "xiongguanlong skull" and found this:

I (badly) edited the picture in Paint and ended up with this:

I'm so bad at graphic design
don't forget to reverse this if you're gonna use it... I won't be offended if you don't use it

Fortunately, the white areas weren't really visible in the actual tattoo!


I had some trouble figuring out what the other mini tattoo was there on her inner elbow - my wife determined it was probably an eagle. So I found some eagle clip art:

For the "Semper Fi" tattoo, I found this font, installed it, and saved an image of the words.


Time to print everything out!

Unfortunately, I realized the day of the Halloween party that the water slide paper I bought was the wrong kind. The one I bought only works as decals (the stupid kind that you put on mugs and then can't run the mugs through the dishwasher), and doesn't work on skin. I tried, but it came off basically immediately. So my wife went without tattoos when she wore her Zia costume.

I ended up getting some actual tattoo paper before the day of Halloween, and it worked beautifully! It took some time to put on because there are just so many tattoos, but it was really simple to work with.


I actually managed to get some pictures of the tattoos after putting them on my skin!


I shaved my arm for this
I didn't quite get them lined up correctly









The tattoos are actually still on my arm days later, and yesterday one friend even thought they were real. They've gotten darker because the image on your skin is a gum that's still a little bit sticky, so they've gotten dirty from a couple days' wear. They're waterproof, as long as you don't scrub them! If you do really want them off, they scrub off with relative ease, but some of the last scraps will take some extra effort to get off. I definitely recommend doing these temporary tattoos in order to test out a real tattoo before you have it permanently added to your skin!


I wore white ankle socks with a blue outline, and some black sneakers because my hiking boots aren't dark-colored. I brought a black backpack to work instead of my usual backpack-bag-purse thing. I also attempted to add eyeliner to my eyes and added some to my eyebrows to make them look thicker.


I need to get better about taking pictures of my completed cosplays, because here is where I'd include a bunch of beautiful completed cosplay pictures! So instead, I'll leave you with this image taken at work after I had gotten tired of clip-on earrings pinching my ears and wearing glasses that don't do anything:


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