For those who do not possess nerd inclinations, cosplay is the practice of dressing up as your favorite fictional characters. It is not quite the same thing as the work of celebrity impersonators, though. Cosplay is less about pretending to be a real person and more about the dress up itself: the costume, the props and the craft.
Some cosplayers have even turned the hobby into a source of income, which beats taking the same balcony shots in a bikini for the hundredth time.
Graphic artist Jeff Chapman, though, had an interesting take on the pastime. Using his mastery of photoshop, he takes random stock photos from the internet and morphs them into epic cosplay portraits.
He set up a DeviantArt page where people could send him whatever stock photos they wanted, and he would turn them into costumed masterpieces. The joke works because of the contrast: the painfully generic poses of a stock image, the forced smile and the pointless hand gesture, suddenly wearing armor, capes and superhero spandex.
Where cosplay actually comes from
The word is newer than most people assume. It was coined by Nobuyuki Takahashi of the Japanese studio Studio Hard in June 1983, in the magazine My Anime. It blends “costume” and “play,” using the Japanese habit of shortening borrowed English words into kosu and pure. Takahashi chose it over the older term “masquerade,” which he felt sounded old fashioned.
The word took a year or two to catch on even among Japanese convention fans, and it only became widespread in Japan in the 1990s after television and magazine coverage. Today the biggest stage for it is still Japanese: Comiket in Tokyo, which draws hundreds of thousands of manga and anime fans. In North America, San Diego Comic-Con and New York Comic Con are the best attended fan conventions featuring cosplayers.
Why stock photos are such a perfect target
Stock photography is older than it looks. The industry began gaining traction in the 1920s, when H. Armstrong Roberts built one of the first major stock libraries. Big agencies followed, including the Bettmann Archive, founded in New York in 1936, and eventually Getty Images, formed in 1997.
Over the decades, stock photos developed a look all of their own. Posed lifestyle shots, exaggerated expressions and abstract “concept” images about teamwork, success and global communication are instantly recognizable, even when the subject is something absurd. That shared visual language is what makes them such good raw material for parody. Everybody has seen the businessman pointing at nothing, or the woman laughing alone at her salad. Put that same person in a costume and the image suddenly has a story.
The tool behind the trick
Photoshop was created by two brothers, Thomas and John Knoll, who developed the software in 1987 and sold the distribution rights to Adobe in 1988. Photoshop 1.0 came out on February 19, 1990, for the Macintosh only. It became so dominant that “photoshop” turned into a verb for editing any image, a use Adobe itself discourages to protect its trademark.
Work like this is a reminder of how much skill hides behind a convincing edit. Matching lighting, blending edges, getting fabric to fold naturally over a body that was never wearing it: those are the details that separate a good composite from something that looks like a cut and paste job.
Want to try it yourself?
You do not need to be a professional graphic artist to have some fun with this idea. If you want to start editing your own images, or get into cosplay without spending a fortune, a few pointers:
- Use images you have the right to use. Many stock sites have licenses that allow editing, but not all do, and a watermarked preview is not yours to publish. Your own photos are always the safest starting point.
- Learn layers and masks first. Almost every good composite is built from layers and masks rather than erasing pixels. It is the single skill that makes everything else easier.
- Match the light before anything else. A costume element lit from the left on a face lit from the right will never look real, no matter how carefully you cut it out.
- Start with one prop, not a full costume. In real life cosplay, a single well made item, like a helmet or a jacket, beats a head to toe outfit put together in a hurry.
- Pick characters that suit you. The best cosplayers choose characters they genuinely like and can carry off, instead of chasing whatever is trending.
- Go to a convention first as a spectator. You will learn more about materials and construction from ten minutes talking to a costume maker than from an hour of videos.
Why it still makes us laugh
Part of the appeal of these edits is that they turn one of the most boring genres of photography into something genuinely creative. Stock photos are designed to be neutral enough to sit next to any article or advert. Turning that blank, smiling model into a comic book hero is a small act of rebellion against the beige world of corporate imagery.
It is also a good example of the internet at its best: someone with a very specific skill, a sense of humor and an open invitation for people to send in their worst stock photos. No brand deal, no marketing plan, just good work shared for fun.
If you like the idea of taking one skill seriously and running with it, our piece on cooking one thing extremely well makes a similar argument in the kitchen. Mastery of one thing tends to be more fun, and more impressive, than being average at everything.
