Bendy and the Ink Machine starring: Sammy Lawrence!

Sammy Lawrence is a character from the indie horror game, Bendy and the Ink Machine. Sammy was the main musician for the Joey Drew Studios cartoon show, “Bendy the Dancing Demon,” his favored instrument being a banjo. Sammy was already an unstable personality long before he began consuming and being brought to complete insanity by the ink that’s brought the cartoon characters to life. Now he’s a “man” made of ink, obsessively trying to please and praise the Ink Demon as if it were his god, in hopes that it will let him free. 

I got into BaTIM back in 2020, but never really played through it until 2025. I’ve always liked Sammy Lawrence as a character, but my favorite has always been The Projectionist. So why did I decide to make Sammy instead of The Projectionist? Well, at Fan Expo Cleveland 2025, I saw a Sammy Lawrence cosplayer in the crowd but wasn’t able to get a picture with them. The cosplay was high quality compared to some of what I’ve seen, and I was immediately inspired to make my own. On top of this inspiration, this was a good opportunity for me to learn how to dye and paint fabric, and how to paint a 3d grease-pencil style. Also, Sammy is a much more visually interesting (and easier to accomplish) cosplay than the projectionist ever will be, unfortunately.

Sammy Lawrence has attended Steel City Comic-Con on August 10th 2025, where I entered Sammy into the teenage cosplay contest, and made it to the finals! The others who placed did an incredible job and I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to compete with them. In November, Sammy got a photoshoot along with Link (and Ezlo) and The Hollow Knight, those photos will be uploaded once I receive them. And in January of 2026, right on my birthday, Sammy got to fly down to New Orleans for Fan Expo. At Fan Expo, I got to meet loads of very enthusiastic fans, break the elastic on his mask and go to the repair booth (those people are saviors, even more so than the Ink Demon!,) walk the red carpet, and had the incredible chance to get more professional photos done by The Project Cosplay Photography (on their own website and on Instagram under the same name), which came out stunningly!

So, how did I create this cosplay?

Sammy’s mask is made from a sheet of foam board¹. This was, at the time, I thought, a great idea. Cardboard, while the same material as his mask in the game, is too brittle and has a tendency to wrinkle, and EVA foam doesn’t have the rigidity that I’d need. And the foam board did in fact work nearly perfectly! Except for the fact that it’s the worst material to cut curves into. And the entire mask is curved. Cutting out the general shape wasn’t particularly difficult, it was more so cutting out the eyes and mouth. After it was cut out I attempted to clean it up, but it didn’t work out very well so I just left it for later. After that I made it wearable, I padded between the eyes on the back of the mask with upholstery foam² and lined it by gluing some random fabric I had lying around over it and put an elastic³ strap contraption down on the back. It’s one thick elastic strap that comes around the back of my head horizontally, and two smaller ones that go down left and right to help keep the mask from tilting up. Finally, I meshed in the eyes with black cross stitch fabric⁴—my go-to fabric for making eyes that sit close to my face that I can see out of but people can’t see in. The mask itself is pretty uncomfortable to wear, but I’ve grown used to it. I can’t get around the huge blind spot directly in the center of my vision if I want to stick with screen accuracy (does Sammy use echolocation in the game? There’re no cutouts on the eyes!), so it definitely takes practice to wear. Honestly, if I were to remake the mask to be more comfortable, I’d glue a construction helmet suspension⁵ to the back of the mask so I could just wear the mask like a hat. After all that, I primed the mask with acrylic gesso⁶ and painted it with Folkarts acrylic paint⁷. To sketch down where the designs lay on the mask, I hung the mask up flat on a wall and used a projector that connected to my computer to trace around where the black and yellow divided. After I got the sketch, I painted some yellow straight on to the mask. By the way guys, this is your reminder to never try and darken yellow with black or brown that has a blue undertone!! It took me far longer than I’d like to disclose to get the right color that wasn’t green. 

I chose to make Sammy’s dustpan instead of his usual axe for a few reasons. First, everyone else does the axe. Second, I couldn’t find a good STL file for it. Third, I was not about to go out of my way to make it out of EVA foam. So, the dustpan I bought off Amazon, I tried to get one that didn’t have too wide of a pan. The first thing I did was sand the whole thing down with sandpaper⁸ to make glue and primer go on more easily. Then, I cut out two pieces of EVA foam⁹ that matched the shape of the handle in my reference photos and hot glued¹⁰ it on. The piece on the top of the handle was shaped differently from the bottom, lacking the flared end that connects to the pan. Then I cut one continuous rectangular strip of foam and glued it along the top and bottom pieces to finish off the handle as one 3d shape. There was still a gap where the actual handle slanted down to connect to the pan, and where the top EVA foam piece met the rim of the pan. I couldn’t be bothered to cut foam to fit either, so I used foam clay¹¹ (rather uneducatedly, without the help of any water), to fill it in (revising this a few months after it was originally written and I have to say, sometime between November and January with the foam clay having been applied in August, the foam clay I used to thicken up the walls of the dustpan has shrunken and no longer meets the bottom of the pan). The rest was pretty easy from here; I covered it in acrylic gesso and painted it with the same yellow as the mask. Cel-shading this was fairly complicated compared to the clothes and mask because it was “more” 3d, but I had plenty of references to make the job easy. Now—you may notice if you go online, there aren’t any references for the dustpan besides the image at the beginning of this blog. I actually rebought the first game on steam just to mod¹² it so I could no-clip into the wall and float around the dustpan to take screenshots, I’ll include the images taken below. 

The pants are a pair of men’s 100% cotton painters pants¹³ I bought online, and dyed with RIT natural fabric dye¹⁴. Though they were too dark after being dyed, and there was a confusing lack of runoff, so I quickly threw them in a gentle cycle in the washing machine and they did lighten up to where I wanted them to. The suspenders were hand sewn, also made with 100% cotton fabric (and thread) and were dyed simultaneously with the pants. After everything was dyed, I made my mom wear the pants so I could use a fine-tipped fabric marker¹⁵ to sketch out where the designs on the pants sat. Then I laid them flat on a sheet of cardboard, put more cardboard sheets in the legs, and began painting with Tulip black brush on fabric paint¹⁶. I really don’t have much to say on how I painted the pants or suspenders — I just followed the reference images as closely as I could. After I got the designs down, I lightly dry brushed the black around areas that experience the most wear (and near the bottoms of the pants for subtle ink stains). Finally, I flicked paint over everything to get the ink drops.  

That concludes how the cosplay was made. I’m very happy how this cosplay turned out, and working with cel-shaded clothes and props is definitely something I’m looking forward to doing again in the future. Sammy is easily my favorite cosplay as of publishing this blog.