Creating the perfect Halloween Costume for Tracer of Overwatch (Part 2)

Here it is. Our costume inspired by the Overwatch character Tracer for our 7-year old son. It was quite the creative endeavor, greatly aided by duct tape ...

The core elements of the character: the bomber jacket, the power-pack, and the goggles.

For the power-pack, we took the two battery-powered lights I had acquired and put them inside two white Chinese take-out containers. Tracer's pack is blue, so we experimented with coloring the container with a blue Sharpie and also putting some blue paper inside of it.  Then we duct-taped them onto cardboard, with slots in the back to reach in and turn the lights on/off.  I actually re-cut the cardboard after I took these photos, to make the foundation shape an X rather than a diamond, so it was easier to duct-tape onto the straps ...


For the straps, I criss-crossed 2 lunch box straps and hooked them together on the sides, then duct-taped the power-pack onto the straps. By then moving the hooks on the bottom/sides of it, it became somewhat of a vest that we could unhook and take off for riding in the car.

To create the jacket, I used an old, lined, brown Lands' End jacket (or was it L.L. Bean? Who can really tell the difference, anyways) and turned under the hood to make it look like a collar. Then I sewed on the patches we bought from Serephitic. (If I hadn't found those, I had planned to draw/color the patches, seal them in clear Contact paper, then pin them on.)

For the gloves, we used some of my old colorguard gloves from highschool and binder-clipped sheets of foam to make her bracer-cuff thingies.

And ski goggles to finish it off.



The finished Tracer costume was Awesome.

And the really great part was that once it got dark the power pack was a great combo flashlight and keeping-track-of-child device. My son was totally jazzed.

The two things that made him a little shy were that 1) he was dressed as a girl (to which I responded that no one knows who Tracer is, much less her gender) and 2) answering the question "Who are you dressed as?" It was a mouthful for him to say "I'm a videogame hero named Tracer from a game called Overwatch that is in closed Beta right now." So I think some folks thought he was a WWII bomber with a big Ironman light on his chest.

And that was OK, too.