Black History Month 2022: GiveWave Studios
I think the first time I took a cosplay photo of Castro from GiveWave Studios was at Rhode Island Comic Con in November of 2014. He was cosplaying as a spot-on Mister Sinister from the X-Men comics, which you can see in the linked gallery as the photos in front of the terrible mottled black and gray backdrop (I haven’t used that one since).
I didn’t get his cosplayer info then, and still forgot to when, just a few months later in March 2015, I took photos of him as Cervantes from Soul Calibur VI at Pax East. It wasn’t until Super MegaFest in October 2015 when Castro brought back Mister Sinister in an updated look, that I thought to get the info for this clearly incredibly talented cosplayer. Just a few weeks later, at 2015’s Rhode Island Comic Con, he floored me with a comic-book accurate Klaw (which I had photographed earlier in the year at the then-named Hartford Comic Con without knowing it was him) and also a movie-accurate Yellowjacket from the movie Ant-Man. Oh, and he made the child-sized Wasp costume for the young cosplayer with him in the photos from that year.
Clearly Castro was a talented crafter and costumer, and it wasn’t long before his props were all over the New England cosplay scene. Out of his studio in Lowell, Mass., Castro built a business focused mainly on cosplay — making both prefabricated and custom-made props, as well as offering classes on how to craft just about anything a cosplayer would want to make. Castro was one of the first people I know to adopt 3D printing as a part of prop making, and with his studio located in an even larger maker space, he has access to almost any tool a cosplayer would need (although I don’t think he ever found a use for the scanning electron microscope the local university was storing there when I first visited).
GiveWave Studios has for years held what it calls Cosplay Friday — for eight hours from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. a cosplayer can get access to all the studio’s tools and Castro’s advice for just $10. Because that includes time on the 3D printers, you have to book in advance, and he limits the attendance. If you are not in New England, I really hope someone in your area does something similar.
We now use Smugmug to present cosplay photo galleries and will post all photos there, with a link to each gallery in its own gallery article. This will allow us to give you higher resolution images to download — still for free.
To view the entire gallery, just click on the image below. If you are pictured in any of our galleries, feel free to download the images and use them non-commercially on social media, with appropriate credit.
If you like our work and want to show your appreciation, feel free to tip us at Ko-fi or become a patron on Patreon.
