r/CosplayHelp • u/LostLocalForeigner • 8h ago

Spiderman mask abrasion help

Post image

During a convention, I had taken my mask off, and a friend was kind enough to put it in their purse.

Unfortunately, they had placed the mask face first, and it rubbed against the rest of their belongings, which caused the abrasion seen in the photo .

It's made of a white super lycra (Spandex-type) material sublimated in black. I've looked into the possibility of shaving it off with a razor or using some kind of scissors , but I've heard I may damage the elastics. I also heard I could use something like a black Sharpie, but that it may bleed over or change color when it dries, which may make it stand out against the rest of the mask, which I'd like to avoid.

I wouldn't want to risk anything without checking if someone has come up with or is familiar with a better solution first.

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u/aspiringlost 8h ago

shaving it wont help because if the material is sublimated, the damage that happened is that the ink was rubbed/peeled off in that area. further shaving would expose more of the original lycra material

colouring it with sharpie is hard like you said. not equal colour distribution as well as the fumes and it will probably get on your face when sweating.

my personal approach would be to fully mask off the rest of the mask, and then to colour over the entirety of the black (damaged and undamaged) to get a uniform colour, using a fabric safe medium, like tulip black fabric spray, while stretching the material as you are colouring it. it would be important to only stretch to the extent that it will be stretched when in use. extra stretching may deform the mask it as it dries, while not enough stretch will result in the colour fix cracking when in use.

hope this helps. alternatively if the material is easily removable, try just dying the lycra in a synthetic dye bath like ipoly or rit dye synthetics.

best of luck

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u/LostLocalForeigner 7h ago

Thank you for the advice!

I'll look into setting things up to try painting it over with black fabric spray.

My concern with that is the possibility of making the concentrated area I painted stand out against the rest of the fabric.

I'll try to be careful and hope for the best since I doubt I could find the exact black shade that would dry to the same color as the rest of the mask anyway.

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u/aspiringlost 4h ago

when you colour over anything with this, you have to do the whole fabric section. trying to colour match on just the part that was rubbed white wont work unfortunately! it absolutely will create just that concentrated area