Paul has been fascinated by Indian mythology for 30 years and the story he wanted to start with was one of the goddess Kali. Watching Claire perform at bellydance festival Triboriginal last October, he noted her fierce intensity, as well as her skill with a sword.

“She would make a great Kali.” he said, and proposed the idea to her. She also had a strong connection to the Kali archetype and so “The Triumph of Kali” was born.

We started with a beautiful retelling of part of her story in the Time/Life series “The Enchanted World”. Indian myth is so complex it’s hard to find a beginning and end sometimes, every character and place has 3 back stories and 4 continuing ones. We trimmed and reworked it. Here is the basic plot:

This story starts with the relationship of Parvati and her consort Shiva. Shiva is fanatically dedicated to his meditation on top of a mountain, and is not appreciating his beautiful and loving partner. Parvati decides if she can’t beat him, to join him. She becomes a wandering mendicant, chanting prayers night and day in the wilderness. After a few years of this she meets a rude beggar who tells her she is wasting her beauty chanting the name of the base Lord Shiva. She defends her love and, lo and behold, the beggar reveals himself to be Shiva himself. He tells her he can’t live without her and had given up his meditation to search for her. They have a loving reunion.

Back on top of the mountain they live happily, but in the lower realms an evil demon is wreaking havoc, terrorizing her followers who she considers her children. They call out to her for help. She hears their cries and becomes enraged like a mother bear. Her rage transforms her completely and she is becomes a wild warrior with a third eye, wearing skulls and severed arms, her tongue lolling about. She descends the mountain and does battle with this demon. He has a unique gift – when his blood is shed and hits the ground, armies of new demons rise up from it. But Kali knows about this, and after she slices off his head, she drinks every drop of his blood before it spills. He is destroyed.

She then dances wildly around the battlefield slaying the other demons that had gathered to torment her followers. She is in a frenzy of bloodlust and kills everything she can reach. Shiva watches this from the mountain top and, being the god of destruction himself, can relate. But he doesn’t want his beloved Parvati to be fully consumed by her aspect of Kali. So he comes down and calls out to her to stop. She is blind to him and continues her dance. He finally lays down at her feet and as she leaps upon him ready to stab, she looks into his eyes. This brings her back to her loving self.  They embrace and return once again to their mountain to live and love.

Claire called in her beautiful friend Magick Sean to play Shiva. She also recruited wonderful sitar and tabla players Tom Cowan and Noah Wilson. Multi-talented Julia Amlund did make-up hair, photography and general support. There were some glitches along the way including Paul suddenly becoming the narrator at the very last minute. Various illnesses and work hours impacted the rehearsals. The costume wasn’t done until the day of the first performance. We never actually did the whole piece through until that first performance! But it came together beautifully, mainly due to Claire’s  hard work and attention to detail.

We did just three performances. We were the last piece of the evening shows. The audience moved from the Bebe Theater over to Firestorm Cafe for our piece. This allowed us to create a ritual atmosphere. Sean/Shiva greeted the audience with ashes and rosewater as they seated themselves on the floor. He anointed the foreheads of those who wished it. The musicians played softly. Paul then began to read the story and Claire and Sean enacted it. It was very well received.

We were even awarded “The Artist(s) that best challenged and/or pushed the boundaries between art forms” by the Fringe Festival producers. Now we have some offers to put the piece on in other places!

We plan to get some better pictures of the costume in the next few weeks. I’ll post them here and on Facebook.

We apologize for the warning messages you may have received when trying to access our site in the last week. We were hacked. Paul spent the last four days finding and cutting out the mean and ugly code secreted away by internet vultures.

A warning to those of you with your own WordPress sites – because it is such a popular platform, the vultures have learned tricks to break into it. Make sure your user name and passwords are strong.

We have resubmitted our site to Google and, hopefully, in the next 24 hours they will remove their warnings.

Thank you for your understanding.

Custom costumes for Venus Uprising

A very happy new year to all of you wonderful freaks! Organic Armor is profoundly grateful for your support this year. May your 2012 be full of genre-bending, dramatic interpretations, alternative futuristic innovations, and the embodiment of the divine!

We’ve been rather quiet online for months due to several complicated custom orders. These time consuming projects have made us re-evaluate how we do custom orders. We’ve decided to change the policy, accepting only certain kinds and only a limited number of them.

We love making the outrageous projects you guys come up with but unfortunately we lose money on most of them. We have to get smarter about our labor intensive business because the recession is hitting home. The wake up call was seeing that 2011 was our best year ever in sales, and yet we are still scraping by.

There is always a “gift” attached to each custom job – like the development of a new technique, or a new cameo mold we can use again, or a fabulous photo shoot, not to mention the love of our customers for manifesting their visions. We value these highly.

However the bigger pieces average 100+ hours. This sometimes works out to a couple of dollars per hour, and that doesn’t take into account the overhead or the admin hours. To help you see what is involved, here is the story of a custom job:

1. We get an email inquiry with ideas and reference pictures. I (Jennifer) go back a forth a few times, giving estimates, refining the concept. Once everyone feels secure about what’s expected, a deposit is made and it is put in to the production schedule. Guessing how long it will take to make and when the orders before it will be out the door is an inexact science at best, but we try. All the notes and pictures are then gathered together for easy reference (Google Docs works well for this).

Devil Jinn gauntlets before painting

2. When the time comes to start the piece Paul reviews the order. After digging up more reference material if needed, through search engines, books and videos, he formulates a plan. There is an art to interpreting the various, sometimes contradictory  images, and figuring out what the customer is seriously set on, vs. what they want us to do in our own way.

3. With a plan (mostly in his head and a few rough sketches on paper), Paul makes a form to build the base on, something that approximates the shape and size of the body that will be wearing it. If all our customers lived in Asheville this part would be a lot easier. (Why don’t you all move here? Then we could try them on you as we go!) Instead Paul can be found  looking around Riverview Station for people of the right size for his current project.

“Hey, you have long legs/an extra large head/big biceps, will you come upstairs and let me try something on you?”

4. With the form made (out of glamorous materials like old foam, tin foil, wire and tape over scrap wood or a beat up mannequin), he starts building the base of the piece. Sometimes he alters an existing base, like a wool top hat or a bra. Often he builds from scratch. This involves feats of engineering genius and a lot of  trial and error as he figures out what structure will allow him to build the final shape, and allow a body to wear it comfortably. He makes mock ups in cardstock until he has something that works, then he constructs it from a variety of materials including foam, fabric, wire and even chopsticks. He knows from years of wearing costumes himself how a headpiece that wants to slip forward will give you a headache and make you hate wearing it.  Organic Armor, being somewhat rigid and somewhat flexible, can hold almost any shape. But it has to be designed to hold that shape and stay put through stilt walking, belly dancing and bike riding across the playa. Translating cosplay pieces is especially challenging because these designs were created in digital media and have little connection to actual human bodies.

clay originals and painted rubber castings

He tries things on as he goes, asking  himself – where does the weight fall? How much stress will each joint get?  How will this get put on/taken off? We are proud of the results. Organic Armor is known for being light, comfortable and functional.

5. Once he has a base, he moves into the next level of structure and the surface design. This varies a lot, but sometimes it means adding cast rubber elements. The cameos and many other unique parts are sculpted in clay first. Paul says this is one of his favorite parts of the process. Happy hours slip away as he shapes and refines the clay. Then he makes a mold of it, using a variety of means. He slip casts the pieces in the molds slowly, letting each layer dry in between. This can take several days. There are always molds sitting on the warming trays in various stages. Each one can produce a limited number of castings before the detail wears away. Sometimes the molds crack and the process has to be started again.

He then adds the cast sculptures, scrolls, piping and vents to the base, refining, cutting and adjusting as needed to create a balanced design. Sometimes he has to redesign the base half way through because things are not hanging right or the weight is off.

6. The last step of construction is brushing and spraying on many layers of material to achieve a smooth cohesiveness between all the elements.

goat horns in process

7. Then it’s time to paint it. This requires daylight and an alert mind. Trying to paint stuff at 4 in the morning usually results in a redo (not that we would know anything about that, LOL). It’s usually done in the dry brush technique, another patient, multi-layer process. Color is so subjective -  one man’s gold is another’s silver. A lot of interpreting from reference images and customer descriptions goes on at this stage. But Paul is a master at metallics so it usually proceeds without a hitch. The last step is a protective UV clear coat and adding laces, gluing in the glass stones, feathers or other non-Organic Armor elements.

Sometimes the weather will throw in a wild card too. There are a few months of the year when the studio is really hot or really cold and the materials (and artist) get difficult.

So you can see there is a lot to a custom job. Because every job is different it’s been hard to figure out what to charge. When we make inventory many of these steps are skipped or have been streamlined.  I keep raising the custom prices and they still end up too low. I always think about the customer, a creative person like us, usually operating on a shoestring in service to a vision. But we’re operating on a shoestring too.

So we had to say “Stop!” for a little while. We are developing a formula based on how different the piece is from other things we’ve done. Something with an existing or slightly altered base, like a regular bra or top hat has one percentage added on. Something wholly new has a much higher percentage. We will also only be taking on one custom job at a time.

We will be starting this policy at the beginning of February, after we finish what’s on our plate.

Here’s to a prosperous 2012 for all of us!

We’re also working on a full set of armor based on the Ventus character from Kingdom Hearts. Having camera issues lately so I’ll just show you one of the reference pictures for now.

We have been reevaluating our business model as well, and will be announcing some changes in a few weeks.

Stay warm and cozy!

Onca, queen and founder of the event, calls Tribo “Cozy community on an epic scale”. It’s a perfect description.

Last night we set up our booth. Inventory is a bit thin since we’ve been so busy with Halloween orders. This is our busiest fall ever, coming on the heels of our busiest summer!

There was a variety show showcasing the non belly dance talents of some lovely ladies (and a few special gents). Hosted by a pair of hilarious Cabaret OverLords, Sidetracked, it included slam poetry, kid tricks, sea chanties in german and italian, many bad jokes, and some beautiful traditonal indian dance by Jaylee.

The weather was WNC perfection with fall colors all around. Overall a great 1st day. Friday and Saturday night there will be performances that are open to the public and well worth the trip.

Lynette with claws

We are creature designers for a movie!

A few weeks ago we created two special effects creature costumes for The Healer. This is a supernatural thriller currently being shot in the DuPont State Forest just south of Asheville. Written and directed by Giorgio Serafini, it features the rising young stars Joel Courtney and Isabelle Fuhrman. Joel played Joe in the summer hit Super 8, produced by Steven Spielberg. Isabelle Fuhrman has spent a lot of time in WNC this summer, having already played Clove in The Hunger Games.

Production designer Gabor Norman and his team needed a few items for the set just before the first day of shooting. They googled “army surplus Asheville” and found Organic “Arm”or. They loved the images that came up. Gabor had been looking for something to enhance a fight scene between two mysterious forest demons and the guardian characters. He thought we might be able to create it.

He drove up from the production basecamp to see the studio. It was a flurry of activity. Paul and Lynette have been very busy with Halloween orders as well as making inventory for the upcoming Belly Dance Festival TribOriginal.

Paul had always dreamed of creating costumes for fantasy and horror films, but getting a foot in that door is tough. When we moved to Asheville from LA four years ago  he said “If Hollywood is ever going to find me, they will have to come to North Carolina to do it.”

Well, Hollywood is coming to North Carolina more and more these days, thanks to new incentive program in the form of a refundable tax credit. Spending by production companies is expected to top $200 million in 2011, the highest ever.

Gabor was thrilled with what he saw and asked if we would help him create his monster vision. The only stipulations – not much was left in the budget AND shooting started in one week! We decided the opportunity was worth it, and spent the next six days and nights working madly on the pieces. It’s amazing what motivation and enough coffee can do!

Despite it’s big name actors, The Healer has a small art department with a budget to match but Gabor and his team are thrilled with the creative opportunity it has provided them. The story is visually rich and layered. It has some of the mystery of  The 6th Sense and the dark beauty and horror of  Pan’s Labyrinth.

The forest monsters are man-like shadow creatures who look as if they have emerged from the roots of a tree. Their hands are razor sharp clawed branches. We designed and constructed gloves, sleeves and a chestplate. We also built four “Gandalf sticks” as they were unofficially named. Padded with foam to make the fight scene safer, they look like something between an oak walking stick and a mage’s staff.  Paul took a walk around the train yard behind the studio to find actual branches to use a core.

We all got to visit the set last weekend, even Connor.  We watched the crew and actors shooting a night scene in the dark forest by a rushing waterfall. Seeing the creature actors wear the pieces, along with full body makeup, leather garments and fish eye contact lenses was thrilling.

The next day we went back to filling orders for Valkyrie style bras and steampunk top hats, but the excitement of The Healer has not worn off. We will get a creature design credit in the film, due out in 2012. You will definitely hear about it here when it’s released.

If it does well at the box office, perhaps more creatures will be emerging from Asheville onto the big screen in the future.

New rams horns at the Temple of Visions

Well, we’re back from CA. It was a wonderful trip – so good to see old friends and meet new ones. The Temple of Visions Burning  Trunk Show and Prepare for the Playa were very successful. We’ve been almost cleaned out of inventory!

Many of our dear customers are in the Black Rock Desert right now. And many more are putting the finishing touches on their DragonCon costumes. We will not be on the playa (Radhika is representing again), but we will be in Atlanta at DragonCon on Saturday. Not as vendors but participants enjoying the cosplay. We’ll be donning some steampunk goodies.

We’ve started several lovely belly dance sets and some Halloween orders. Our next show is TribO in October. The online shop is not open yet, I still have to photograph some new pieces and upload them. Hopefully next week it will be back up.

Enjoy your weekend revelry, wherever it is!

Prepare for the Playa make-over winner. Isn't she lovely?

We’ll be at the Temple of Visions Burning Trunk Show, in Los Angeles, Thursday 8/11 starting at 5:00. And then at the Prepare for the Playa show on Aug. 14th, noon to 6, at Cafe Cocomo in San Francisco.

Come visit us if you are nearby! New horns and bras to see and try on.

I’ve turned off the website shop until we return, as well as our Etsy site.They will return on 8/23.

Here are a couple of new photos from our collaboration with Moonshine Baby Creations. They are for sale on her Etsy page. You can now find gorgeous feathered pasties like these at VaVaVoom in Asheville.