Hello and welcome to my channel. Today I'm going to give you a countdown of my top five Guild Wars 2 fashion tips for fashion contest. If you don't know me my name is Larian and I have been playing Guild Wars 2 for almost nine years. There's so much about Guild Wars 2 that I love but some of my favorites are the great community, fashion wars, festivals and jumping puzzles. I've been hosting slash judging Guild Wars 2 fashion contests twice a month for over a year now. I've seen some amazing this is out of this world creative looks and then some very interesting what the crap did I just see looks. So before we get to the countdown I just want to give you a disclaimer. These are my personal tips for fashion contests. Fashion is pretty subjective so what I think might be useful or a good tip another judge or host could have a different opinion. These tips are here to help give you a general education on competing in fashion contests. Some I have learned from judging them myself but also from what I have learned competing in many other fashion contests but just because you follow them to the tee doesn't mean that you're automatically going to place or win okay awesome so let's get to the countdown. Tip number five number five is all about outfits or rather the lack of using the outfits. Outfits are great if you just want a quick look for personal play or having fun during festivals but unless the fashion contest theme is specifically for outfits do not use them. Outfits are also a great way to tell the judge I couldn't think of anything so I just decided to choose something that was already made. One of the quickest rules you will learn is that fashion is all about creativity and outfits are definitely not creative for fashion contests. Anybody can easily pick an outfit so try to be original. Tip number four theme or story. Come up with at least a general theme for your character. You can even get more detailed and create a full on backstory for them. Tragedy backstory generator anyone. Common theme examples include ice or snow angels steam punk nature wizard animal or you can get more specific with its got room cosplay. Cosplay can be a hit or miss with fashion contests so if you don't say it in the rules make sure to ask if cosplay is allowed. Next you may want to get more particular with your character theme. For example say the general theme of the fashion contest is cyberpunk. You'll want to think what type of cyberpunk theme do I want to make. A more dystopian outlaw look or maybe more technology focused. Having a specific theme helps get the creative juices flowing and gives you a great starting point. This will also make it easier when choosing the armor pieces weapons etc for your characters later on giving it an overall cohesive look in the tip number three weapon matching. Now you may be wondering what do I match my weapon to? My theme or my does. And the answer is yes both of them. You don't want a dark necromancer look with a colorful magical weapon skin right? Hold on I think I just came up with a new idea for a fashion contest. Anyways your weapon should match your theme and at least one of your does. You don't have to go overboard and make sure the weapon has every single color you are using though. As the saying goes less is more. Some people, myself included, finished a look only to realize that they don't know what weapon they're going to use with it. Then you spend hours upon hours upon hours, searching your wardrobe to either get lucky and find the what perfect weapon, find one that kind of matches or you don't find one at all on her left weapon list. Let me know in the comments if this happened to you. Which being weaponless isn't the end of the world and depending on your look you may not even need weapons. But to make it easier on yourself you may want to decide what weapons you're going to use first. Especially since we can't die weapons. Yet I'm looking at you arena net. Tip number two. Limitation of armors. Ideally you don't want to use more than two pieces of the same armor set. Sometimes there's an exception for three but two is really the preferred number. Using a whole set of the same armor is a big no no. This is because it basically comes back around to what creativity. For example, here I select all of the same set of carapace armor. Of course it looks like together. It's supposed to because it was all made to match and fit. But using all the same armor set is like putting on an outfit. No thought press us behind it and it's an easy out. Armor pieces are the centerpiece of your fashion and can easily make or break your look. So make sure you have time to sit down, go through your wardrobe and think about what you want to do. Most of us that compete regularly have taken hours and even days. Yes, I said days to finally settle on what we think were the best choices. If we don't have an armor piece, we will search the Guild Wars two wiki and find out if there's a way for us to get it. If this seems overwhelming or unattainable to you then start small by challenging yourself to only pick three pieces of the same armor set. Work with that for a while. Then go to two. Then eventually work up to only one of the same armor sets. I promise it's possible. If you'd like to preview all of the available armors without having to spend hours in the wardrobe, head on over to the Guild Wars two wiki and search for armor. It will bring up this page and you can see on the rot is listed all of the races and options for light, medium and heavy for male and female. So just choose one to view and tada all the previews. Super easy. Now before we get to the last tip, I would like to tell you about an honorable mention, which is location location location. If you know the location of the fashion contest in advance, either go work on your look there or make sure to check out your fashion there ahead of time. You want to do this because of lighting. Not all lighting interior is created equal. It might be darker or brighter in this location and the sooner you know, the quicker you can adjust your look. Make sure to check during both daytime and not time because fashion contests can take a while and there's no guarantee on which one it's going to be. Yay! We finally made it to number one. Have you guessed what it is yet? A thousand ways to die. Not really, but that's going to be tricky so I'll go over two important tips. Yes, I'm giving you two tips with this one. Typically you want at least three different dies of the absolute minimum. Two main colors and then an accent color. After that you can start to add other colors for shadows, a third main color, or a second accent color. These can be the complementary colors or the same color, just different shades. Like I said, tricky. Especially when it comes to the different armor sets. Leathers will not die the same as metals, even when using the same exact color. Usually you end up trying every other shade of that color to see what works and sometimes it's a completely different color altogether. Even more confusing is when it turns out to be that white is actually black on some of the armor pieces. It makes no sense. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk. Another thing you want to think about with dies is that what kind of emotion or connection you want to convey with your theme? If you haven't heard of color theory you should definitely look it up. Actually I'm going to include a link in this video description that explains it better than I could. But for a small example, what comes to mind with the color red? Is it anger, love, fire? What about the color yellow? Maybe sun, happiness, hope? This really starts getting into the psychology of it all, but it's definitely something to think about. If you're just stuck on what colors would complement it each other or the different shades of a color which is called monochromatic by the way, head to this website from Adobe. All of these links will be in the description below. Here you can choose different options on the left that will get you on your way. So just play around with it and figure out what you like. If you say to the end, thank you. I really, really appreciate it. If you're interested in competing in my next fashion contest, you can join my discord for all the fashion contest schedules. Also, if this video was helpful in any way, please consider liking this video and hitting that subscribe button. I'm still a small channel so every little bit helps. Now go work on your fashion and I'll see you soon.