
Sharlyn likes to surprise people. Her previous body of work in the field includes making dolls, plastering a Sprocketpunk logo on the wall of our office, painting a commemorative drawing for our one-year anniversary, making us all (much needed) coasters and even hand making a Pokémon-style trading cards for Tristan’s birthday. She even got herself a hanbok and showed up on Day #1 of HobbyCon in traditional Korean attire, especially for our homesick Korean colleagues, Minho and Snow. That’s how the Sharmander rolls.
Her most elaborate surprise to-date came when she emerged on Day #2 of last December’s HobbyCon dressed as Nadine from Shiftling. While the rest of us focused on board games, messing around with the Oculus rift and debating which size burrito to buy for lunch, she managed to sneak off and return dressed as the heroine Minho and Tristan have been bringing to life for the past year. Apparently Sharlyn only got the urge to cosplay Nadine a week out from HobbyCon, leaving her precious little time to pull it off. Despite having never cosplayed before, she was able to pull a few threads and get the whole ensemble to come together in time for the event.

How it went down It’s no secret that Nadine’s clothes are inspired by the traditional clothing of the indigenous people’s of Malaysian Borneo. Her attire is definitely distinct in its own right, but if you happened to have a have a Kadazan-Dusun “moludu” hanging around in your closet, you’d have a good head start on cosplaying Nadine. Sharlyn, while Sabahan herself, is ethnically Chinese, so her closet had been hitherto moludu-less. Luckily, a friend of hers from college had been doing fashion design for over a decade, and her specialty conveniently is Kadazan-Dusun traditional clothing. She gave Nancy Jollok a call.

Nadine’s Brightwood Costume Having arranged to meet “Kak Nancy” as Sharlyn calls her (“Kak” being “big sister,” like onesan in Japanese or eonni in Korean. tl;dr No relation.), Sharlyn was ready to talk moludu tops and kickstart her cosplay. Traditional clothing being varied from area to area, even village to village, the first piece Nancy presented Sharlyn with was a version from Kota Maruda. While no doubt beautiful, this wouldn’t help her bring Nadine to life. Sharlyn was sad. Nadine’s attire with the black and gold edges as she would later discover is more like those from the Penampang area. She was a bit taken aback to learn that the sleeveless design of Nadine’s costume was meant for unmarried young women, and surprised that Minho had incorporated that into his character design all those months ago. She was also bummed that Nancy didn’t have the necessary top design on hand, with HobbyCon only a few days out.
Thankfully, Nancy is a legend. After seeing the character design of Nadine from Brightwood, her home area and the launchpad for the journey that players embark on through the world of Shiftling, she said she would need only two days to produce the top. Score. With that part of the costume done, Sharlyn could focus on the boots, brown tights, the mark covering Nadine’s hand and the Tagal family necklace. Tattoo/Mark It would have been a total surprise for everyone on our team, if only Sharlyn had physically been capable of tattooing her own right hand. Not being ambidextrous, and not keen on drawing the tattoo while holding eyeliner in her mouth, she enlisted the help of the Minister, our Art Director Minho. He’s pretty good at drawing Nadine’s tattoo.

Tagal Necklace This was one of the hardest piece to make. Extracting the design from Minho’s art, measuring the exact size and printing it out was a piece of cake. The hard part was finding the perfect sized metal base for the pendant and making sure the final outcome would be waterproof (the design is printed on paper after all). Everything was DIY. It took about a good 4 hours to make sure every seam is perfectly sealed and protected from water and an entire day for the glue and resin to dry completely.

While Sharlyn is going to be hella busy working on motion comics and and other in-game art assets going forward, we hope she finds time to continue cosplaying and help the rest of the gang get stuck in.