The Convention Fans Blog

There are A LOT of cosplay websites out there. In fact, a Google search for “cosplay” returns about 154,000,000 results. Yikes! That’s quite a flurch to sift through, especially if you’re looking for something specific like costuming tutorials, cosplay pics, good forums, or just hunting down some inspiration.

I’ve trawled the internet, poking cosplay forums and consulting the Facebook pages of my costumer associates, and I’ve come up with a list of the five best cosplay sites out there. If you know of a great one that didn’t make the Top 5, sing out on it.

Oh, and I’ve intentionally left out the more porn-y cosplay sites. Each of these five are all-ages friendly.

American Cosplay Paradise

American Cosplay Paradise is a networking site for cosplayers dressing up as characters from their favorite series. So the focus is on anime and manga cosplay.

Naturally, the name implies that it’s all about only cosplay in the United States of America, so that leads one to assume the socialization experience isn’t an international one.

This cosplay website is split into three sub-communities

The Forum of this website encompasses all members. The website also lists conventions of interest to its community.

• American Cosplay Paradise

  A community of female cosplayers. That doesn’t mean cosplaying as female characters, ACP is for women and girls who enjoy cosplay to socialize with their peers. There are photos and such of women cosplaying as male characters in the ACP community.

• American Cosplay Experience

  A community of male cosplayers. That doesn’t mean cosplaying as male characters, ACE is for men and boys who enjoy cosplay to socialize with their peers. There are photos and such of men cosplaying as female characters in the ACE community.

• American Cosplay Snapshots

  A community for photographers specializing in taking photos of cosplayers and costumes.

Cosplay.com

A large cosplayer community. This is the big site that tends to get mentioned first off when people start asking around for good cosplay websites.

There is a Journal Entry feature where members can put up general blog sort of writings. There are also several photo galleries, including one for cosplay photoshoots. In addition to a forum, Cosplay.com features a Marketplace and a Wig Store.

CosplayLab

Members of CosplayLab have a wide range of interests; anime, manga, video game, J-Rock, sci-fi, steampunk, and fantasy costumes. Like Cosplay.com, this is an international community for cosplayers.

The home page mainly features the journal entries of members. Each member gets a My Lab page where they can make the blog-like journal posts and show off their costumes and burble about projects.

CosplayLab also has an Event List and a cosplay pro directory.

Cosspace

Cosspace is best described as MySpace for cosplayers. Only vastly more tasteful and better organized. There are Videos, Groups, a Blog feature, and something called Battle that I can’t quite describe.

This is also an international community, though the only language package currently available is US English.

Kamui Cosplay

Kamui is an AMAZING cosplayer from Germany and writing about her costuming adventures in English on her blog, Kamui Cosplay. She has many how-I-did entries and some tutorials. I like her tip on making jewels for a costume. Kamui does a lot of video game cosplay and I love her World of Warcraft costumes. Other features of the site are a directory of merchant resources, plus a list of workshops she holds.

Kamui makes this Top 5 list because all the cosplayers I know, and their friends, pass around links to this woman’s work and posts. This is a good resource for the the intermediate to advanced cosplayer looking for tips or inspiration.