This week, we present the first of our Gen Con 2024 subjects, Brownie Knight!
We originally met Brownie in our first round of Distant Era workshops in 2022, in which Brownie appeared in an AWESOME Skeletor costume, complete with a badass skull staff.
The following year, we encountered Brownie in the hall, decked out in a brilliant Megoosa costume that had me laughing out loud when I got the pun. We hadn’t recognized her at first, thanks to the exchange of 2022’s skull mask for 2023’s goose headdress and because Brownie transforms into the cosplays she creates. In our spontaneous 2023 conversation, we talked about how much fun it would be to shoot together again.
This year, Brownie reached out early in the summer about setting up one of those sessions. We’re friends on social media, so through various posts, I began to see her costume pieces take shape, though I didn’t yet know what she was working on. All was revealed Gen Con week when Brownie booked three mini sessions for her excellent Poison Ivy, Mystique, and Battlejuice costumes.
I grew up watching Masters of the Universe, Batman, X-Men, and Beetlejuice, so I was already a fan of these characters and their genres and excited to see what distinct looks Brownie had built for this year.
Brownie kindly shared with us the joyful motivation behind the cosplays she creates:
The inspiration for all my cosplays tends to come from the things that brought me joy as a child and the “terrible” silly things that make me giggle as an adult or bring back some of that joy. The terrible silliness is how I ended up with sexy Skeletor, Megoosa, and Battlejuice.
Cosplay is first and foremost about joyful creativity for me. I hope that comes through in every character, and even more, hope that I share that joy with everyone I interact with when in character.
Brownie Jo Knight
Poison Ivy
Brownie made some cool vine props for Poison Ivy, which we used to frame her in some shots. In others we had the ivy coming at the camera or attached to Brownie’s arms as though it was lifting her up. Some of my favorite Poison Ivy shots are the ones we did with just a little bit of light. We also tried some red and green gels at the end of our session, as shown in one of our examples below. In our detailed Poison Ivy retouch (above), I added more ivy to the scene so that we can see it surrounding her, coming in from all sides.
Mystique
One of my favorite X-Men characters, Mystique has been fresh in my mind since Disney’s incredible X-Men ’97 show aired this year, prompting us to go back and watch the entire 1990s X-Men animated show. This was like opening a door in the attic of my mind to a room full of X-Men lore. I was crazy for X-Men in the early 1990s, and while I’ve sold all the comics and toys I once had, the lore remains.
Since Brownie had booked three looks, I wanted to make sure we didn’t do the same thing for each of them. we started off shooting on black. Since Mystique’s costume was white, I knew that black would give us the contrast we needed. I had an impulse for some bright backlight for Mystique. It seemed very X-Men to me for some reason, so I set up my large umbrella behind Brownie, and when we began to shoot these, I felt we were making magic. They were some of my favorite shots we did at Gen Con 2024.
As with Poison Ivy, we shot several different setups for Mystique in our twenty-minute session, from a simple, high contrast black background to a bright white backlight to blue gels and a miniature smoke machine! (Enormous thanks to Elizabeth Macdougald for her assistance with the session and for lending us her smoke machine.)
Battlejuice
Brownie’s Battlejuice is an armed and armored up version of the Beetlejuice character, executed with cleverness and craft by Brownie. As with the others, we shifted among looks with our Battlejuice portraits, beginning with our textured background to show the whole costume, then moving into very specific light, and then incorporating contrasting green and purple gels that suited the cartoony Beetlejuice vibe. Brownie picked one of these gelled looks for the detailed Battlejuice portrait (below), so I did my best to make this as wildly animated as I could, while keeping the base black-and-white Beetlejuice aesthetic.
It was a pure pleasure shooting with Brownie again, and I am grateful to her for booking Distant Era for these Gen Con mini sessions. We had a great time making this work with her and seeing the beautiful costumes she made.
Follow Me