Ordered a pair of tabi boots for my eventual Xin Zhao costume.  Personally, I think footwear is one of the most underlooked component on most peoples’ costumes, and I’d rather not try and alter or modify something that I can’t really find on my own for men, and after looking at Xin renderings for hours, I decided that tabi boots seemed like the most logical direction to go and build off of, and fortunately for me, I was able to acquire a pair that was already blue (in spite of the crappy photograph, it was done on my hacked point-and-shoot).

Ultimately, these are a great foundation to work from, and I think I’m going to shape EVA foam or something, and build directly on top of these boots.  Not only will doing this save me a tremendous amount of trouble of figuring out footwear, because they’re legit tabi boots, when I put the costume on, I’ll have a +25 armor, take reduced damage from opponents, and I’ll have a massive amount of mobility out of the gate.  GG