Hollow Knight, The Hollow Knight Itself!

The Hollow Knight is the primary antagonist of the 2017 metroidvania that grasped the gaming community in a choke hold, Hollow Knight. The Hollow Knight, commonly mistaken for the character you play as in Hollow Knight, was a vessel created by the Pale King of Hallownest designed to have no thoughts or feelings to make it the perfect soldier to fight the reckless god that threatens the kingdom, The Radiance. The Hollow Knight ended up failing at its role, becoming overrun with infection and being used as a puppet by The Radiance. 

For the rest of this blog, The Hollow Knight is shortened to “THK.”

I started playing Hollow Knight in September of 2025, a week or so after the release of the sequel that managed to crash every online game store at once, Silksong. A month later, in October, I decided out of the blue one night, that I wanted to make a cosplay of THK. And honestly, it was great. I love this cosplay, not only because of how comfortable and easy it is but because of how good it came out. 

This cosplay has so far it’s attended Motor City Comic-Con on November 14th 2025, and the Video Game Symphony at the Akron Civic Theater on November 22nd 2025 where it won the Rubber City Super Star Costume Contest! December 6th 2025 was GalaxyCon Columbus, the first large convention this cosplay got to attend.

THK was fairly simple to make. The cloak made the patterns for and commissioned from a good friend to make, the shoulder cape is a separate flat rectangle that I safety pin¹ to the lining of the cloak itself. The mask and nail are made from EVA foam², the patterns for them I got online from Navaro³. This was my first time working with EVA foam in this way, and I really hope to remake them in the future because there’s a lot of tips and tricks I could’ve used to make them both better. I used superglue⁴ to connect all the foam and smoothed out the edges with foam clay⁵. The mask and nail were primed with acrylic gesso⁶ and painted with FolkArt acrylic paint⁷. The mesh I used on the eyes is actually cross stitch fabric⁸, my go to for making eyes that others can’t see through. It only works for eyes that are really close to your face though, I will warn. The inside of the mask is padded with upholstery foam⁹, and slides onto my head with a thick elastic band¹⁰. There are magnets¹¹ glued into the bottom of the mask that make the chin slightly heavier than the horns, which make it better to wear. The mask has two spots for helmet fans¹², which are a requirement for me in this cosplay purely because of how humid it can get from my breath inside the mask. The battery pack¹³ for the fans sits in a pocket in the back of cloak’s collar. The nail has a pvc pipe¹⁴ running down the center, this also acts as the handle. 

Now, this cosplay has a surprise, underneath my cloak.

I made the infection that corrupts THK’s body, it sits on my left shoulder with elastic straps. The infection is made of a 2 yard orange cotton sheet and styrofoam domes¹⁵. I made it without any sewing involved, because I didn’t have the bandwidth to learn a new skill. 

I folded the fabric in half, letting the folded edge hang off my table (being anchored down by large books). I took fabric glue¹⁶ and generously squirted it into the fold seam, squeezing it together to glue the sheet in half. After that, I placed down the sheet with the middle open, and figured out where I wanted the domes to be in relation to my shoulder and arm, and hot glued¹⁷ them down, making sure to leave enough space between each one for glue. Then I slowly folded the top half over the domes, gluing it down around the domes with hotglue as I went. Once the fabric had been glued down over everything, I trimmed the excess away and left a bit of extra fabric. 

I then painted between each dome and the back of the whole thing with brush on black fabric paint¹⁸. And then…I had to make a gradient between the black and the orange. I practiced dry brushing on a scrap piece of fabric. The technique I used was as followed: 

Dip a rounded brush in a small bit of paint, and brush off the paint on the brush itself until the brush feels dry to the touch but still wipes off a small amount of paint. Hold your brush at approximately a 45 degree angle to the surface you’re painting, and very lightly brush back and forth with increasing pressure or repetition to build up a more opaque color. 

After breaking my back and spending five hours dry brushing, it was done!! And now was the part I was most excited for…puffy paint¹⁹. I took black puffy paint and loosely followed a few reference images and made the veins on the domes, finishing the look. 

THK is a fundamentally simple cosplay, but one that always seems to be a big hit at conventions, and I hope this cosplay has a long career at events.