Carnival Costume Ideas with Photo Posters

Everyone celebrates Carnival a little differently, but one thing unites all celebrators: the costume. If you don’t want to buy your costume off the rack, use this opportunity to show off your creativity. Here we’ll show you some quirky DIY costume ideas with photo posters.

This costume idea is both unusual and extravagant, yet very easy to implement. All you’ll need for this costume idea is a picture of your favourite painting in the form of a photo poster, 1-2 large pieces of cardboard, and a bit of string.

Start out by searching free image portals, such as pexels, for a painting. Such websites offer licence-free images in high quality. Alternatively, you could also carry out a Google image search and set the desired image size to “large.” When selecting an image to use make sure it has a high enough resolution to ensure the quality doesn’t diminish when printed as a large-formatted poster.

With ifolor, you can order your photo poster in many various sizes. The Mona Lisa painting shown in our example is in 60 x 80 cm format. This ensures that Mona Lisa’s face will be the right cut-out size later on. If you only want to hang the painting in front of your body, we recommend not using a format larger than 40 x 60 cm in order to ensure that your freedom of movement isn’t too restricted.

Your poster will be delivered to your door in 3-5 working days. Then proceed as follows:

1. If you’d like to show your own face in Mona Lisa’s stead, start out by cutting out Mona Lisa’s face using a cutter knife. You can protect the surface underneath using a protective cutting underlay.

2. Glue your poster to a piece of cardboard that is the same size as your poster to give it more stability. If you cut out Mona Lisa’s face, you’ll also have to cut out the cardboard here to keep the hole clear.

3. Use a cutter knife to cut out 2 small holes in the upper corners of the poster. If having trouble getting through the stable cardboard, you can use a sharp object to first puncture the cardboard, e.g. a pen or pencil.

4. Then feed the ends of your string through the holes and knot these together. Now your “canvas” will be complete.

Now your painting will need a frame. If you don’t have a suitable picture frame at home, you can create your own using gold-coloured paper or cardboard. Here we used the same cardboard we used to stabilise the poster. You can create each of the 4 sides of the frame separately. The two long sides are 74 cm in length and 8 cm wide, the short sides 70 cm in length and 8 cm wide. Affix the four sides of the frame together with tape on the back and design it however you’d like. To give our frame a glossy finish, we affixed wide tape on top of it and then sprayed it with a copper varnish.

You can then affix the frame to the painting with glue or double-sided tape. You should leave about 4 cm of space on both sides of the string you attached so it can still move around and isn’t fixed in place.

You can then don a wardrobe that is similar to that of Mona Lisa. In the painting, she is wearing a long dress with a delicate grey-blue shawl. Or, alternatively, you could wear all black. This will make your painting stand out.

Thanks to the excellent printing quality and stability of the photo paper, you can use a photo poster to replicate just about anything. Motifs that are rectangular and relatively flat work best, such as fronts of houses, signs, or packaging. Here you can see our second example costume: a Gameboy. This variant is perfect for gamers. You can also design the screen to display one of your favourite Gameboy games.

The Gameboy costume JPG

A poster in 40 x 60 cm format was created for this costume and affixed to a stabile piece of cardboard. Then some string was attached so the Gameboy can then be hung in front of the body around the neck. Simple and reserved clothes in grey or black are most suitable and fit perfectly with the Gameboy costume.