This year the kids wanted to continue the tradition of Marvel costumes, so they opted for the Guardians of the Galaxy. I personally voted that we go as ghosts, but nobody else agreed with me. The good news is that I am slowly learning that with Halloween costumes, it doesn’t have to be perfectly detailed for it to be effective (especially since a lot of years require putting on warm clothing over top anyway). I mean, we only wear these costumes twice, so there’s no need to spend a million hours perfecting the costumes. This year’s focus was on what made these characters recognizable.
Supplies I used:
Besides our trip to Value World for base pieces, I used inexpensive items from Amazon, or things that I could make at home. My goal was to spend less than $100 for all 6 costumes.
For the makeup: I found this great UCANBE oil based set and I would highly recommend it.
We bought bald caps for Drax and Nebula. I’m not going to post the link for the ones we used because I didn’t like them. They were too thin, and they both tore while we were applying the makeup. My recommendation is to go with something thicker.
Papier-mâché for Groot and Star Lord masks (no surprise there that this is on my list!).
Target has some great spray-on hair colour in their Halloween section. It is only $3 a can and really easy to apply. This was perfect for Gamora and I was surprised at how well it covered. Granted, my daughter has blonde hair, so I cannot vouch for how well it works on darker hair colours.
Marvel Costumes: Groot
Groot was pretty straightforward. I traced around my daughter’s face to get an idea of sizing for her mask. After cutting the shape out of cardboard, I did a few layers of papier-mâché, and painted it to look like Groot. I also put a cardboard band around the back to hold it on and gave it the same treatment as the mask. It fit her perfectly and was easy for her to slide it on and off.
We found some brown pants, a brown shirt and a brown sweater already in her dresser and called it a day. In the past I probably would have tried adding details to the clothes. I am a wiser woman these days.
The best part of this costume was that for trick-or-treating she only said, “I am Groot” instead of “trick-or-treat”. It was very cute.
Star Lord
This was another pretty simple costume to put together. The mask was what made him identifiable, so papier-mâché came in handy once again. The fitting on my son’s mask was a bit trickier, so I added a band over top of his head as well to make sure it didn’t slide down his face. It worked like a charm.
A red fleece sweater became his jacket by adding some black fleece pieces to the shoulders and front. Again, the important part is highlighting the recognizable features of the character. I didn’t spend hours on this.
Rocket
The kids decided on who got to be what characters, and somehow I ended up as Rocket. Since I leave my costume to the end, I usually have to be creative and quick. Fortunately, I found great base pieces that worked for what Rocket wore in the 2nd Guardians movie. I just had to remove the sleeves on the top and attach a fleece striped tail. Easy peasy.
The mask originally was going to be papier-mâché, but I knew it would be difficult making it look like an actual raccoon, and again, time was running out. I decided to print out a picture of his face, mod podge it onto cardboard, and attach an elastic band with some duct tape. It worked like a charm!
Drax
Drax is all about the tattoos. It is far too cold here for anyone to walk around without a shirt for Halloween, so my husband found a fitted grey t-shirt from Target and I went from there. I painted tattoos onto the shirt using red acrylic paint. He wore some black pants and that took care of the majority of his costume.
We used some of that lovely makeup to paint up his face, along with the face tattoos. It was taking way too long to paint the makeup onto the bald cap, so I actually ended up using acrylic paint to cover that (I did it for Nebula too). It was so much faster and worked just as well.
Gamora
Value World really came through on this costume. We were able to find a long leather jacket which basically saved the day. It did smell really bad and required a whole lot of treatment to remove the scent of must, but that’s a whole other story!
My daughter already had black pants, black boots, and a white shirt. We took one of her old black leotards from dance and cut it short to make the vest.
The spray-on hair colouring and makeup finished up the costume nicely.
Nebula
This was probably the hardest costume to make and to do the makeup for. We had red leggings on hand and found a red long-sleeved shirt. I did some sewing work on that to make it look like there was a little jacket over top. Then came the aluminum foil for the arm. I hot glued this to the shirt. The key when applying aluminum foil is to make sure it doesn’t break apart with movement. Once the base of the foil was applied, I had my daughter try on the shirt and move her arm around. As the foil cracked, I applied new strips to the joints.
The makeup was really the beast on this costume. Our big problem ended up being that with 3 characters wearing makeup, it took over 2 hours to get everyone ready and we did not anticipate that much time! I think it still worked out really nicely, but I wouldn’t want to do that again. The bald cap did rip, which made things a big tricky, and it was harder with her thick hair underneath, but we were happy with how things turned out and she got some great comments.
Another Halloween of Marvel Costumes in the Books
So there you have our Guardians of the Galaxy Halloween costumes. I’m just happy that our kids still want to have family costumes, even though they’re getting older and cooler:) Who knows, maybe next year we’ll be a family of ghosts!
If you missed them, you can check out my other Marvel Halloween costumes from last year: Hulk, Captain Marvel, Black Panther, Scarlet Witch, Thor and Loki.