Awesome Homemade Hulk Halloween Costume

I have always wanted to attempt a large project for Halloween and this year I decided to go for it and create a Hulk costume. I am already a big guy (6’7″) but needed to have the massive muscles that make a Hulk costume. With this in mind I planned out how to create a foam suit and then using various thicknesses of foam to carve and glue on muscles. This step was a lengthy procedure and wasn’t actually finished until the day of my Halloween event. Purple shorts were also added with a zipper and a second zipper was added in the back of the chest piece. Finally liquid latex was painted over the entire suit in multiple layers to get the costume as smooth as possible, in the time I had this was two layers, however I would recommend doing three layers to achieve a consistent smoothness. Finally I painted on Acrylic paint to achieve the green look. This completed the chest and shorts. For the shoes I used the same process. I used a hulk mask that I custom painted and applied liquid latex too to create a neck piece. Finally I used my collectable Hulk Hands for the hands in my costume with a small paint job on them. It was truly a crazy time to make this costume and required a lot of effort, logging roughly 100+ hours into it, was all worth it though to see the reactions of people at the party. Hope you all like the costume!

Looking bulky at the party.

Creating the foam vest and shorts.

I used 1′ thick polyurethane foam and a spray adhesive to create a body suit. This was very challenging as the glue took approximately 8 hours to fully dry and the costume would hve to be held in place for this time. To do this i would use weights to hold the foam in place while it glued. The funniest part of this step was having the girlfriend help me to measure and cut the foam for the suit and having people see this through the windows at the dormitory and thinking it was something completely different going on.

Using weights to glue the vest.

Adding the muscles.

For this step I glued on foam pieces of 1′ – 3′ thicknesses and then sculpting the muscles using an electric knife and tailoring scissors. This process was extremely lengthy and was the most trying part of the costuming ordeal. My room often looked like a snowstorm had hit it due to the foam pieces everyhwhere.

Muscles carved on the vest piece.

Measuring/Sewing the shorts.

This was tough! I have zero skills with a sewing machine so had to get a crash course from my mom and get to it. Pretty self explanatory step, used a spandex “stretch-knit” fabric to acheive the stretchy look/ These shorts were then put on like normal shorts over the suit.

Installing back zipper. Make mask.

Sewed a 30 cm zipper to a piece of floor matting to add strength to the zipper and then glued this matting into the foam vest to have a zipper in the back piece. Pretty easy step overall.

At this time I also made a latex neckpiece for my mask, this involved sitting for roughly three hours in the mask with my head held completely still to allow the latex to dry. Painful! Very sore after.

Then paint the mask and neck and go from there.

Mask painted.

Liquid Latex!

-Buy Liquid Latex.

-Paint copious amounts of Liquid Latex over the suit allowing time to dry between coats. Attempt to have the latex dry in as smooth of a layer as possible for the last coats.

Funny side note: I got latex everywhere, EVERYWHERE! I am still peeling small pieces off of my fridge, desk, door, bed, clothes, and even my microwave. Don’t ask how it reached the microwave, i got no clue.

Latex (colored with paint) on the feet.

Latex on the legs.

Latex on the vest piece.

Paint the suit.

I bought acrylic paint that was matched to the color of my hulk hands and used this on the whole suit. Took way longer to dry then I thought it would and thus was still somewhat wet at the party. Was hilarious to see guys who thought it was funny to pretend punch the Hulk and end up getting green paint on them. Teach them to somewhat wreck my costume. lol.

Overall was a great costume and everyone loved it. Well worth the effort.

DONE!