The profile picture I use across most of my social media and website (in 2025) is Justice the Awesome Demon from Vanripper‘s¹ Helltaker. For this year’s Halloween, I decided to dress up as her (forgot to take photos). Here’s my process for making her gloves.

Helltaker?

Helltaker is a puzzle game about the titular protagonist traversing through hell in search of love. It’s comic(?) artist Vanripper‘s debut into game development but is one of the my favourite games of all time. There’s beautiful illustrations and polished UI as expected from an experienced artist, but also satisfyingly difficult puzzles and some of the most challenging boss fights I’ve ever played. This, combined with Mittsies‘ infectious original soundtrack, makes for incredibly addictive gameplay that’s just long enough to satiate but due to the game’s popularity, Vanripper was kind enough to double its length with the Examtaker update. The game also has accompanying comics on Vanripper‘s X page, which further explores the compelling setting and lore. As a free game on Steam with minimal system requirements and short length, there’s no excuse to not try it out.

Note that while the game is tagged as mature, it’s very tame (as it says on the store page).

Reference Material

As far as I can tell, Justice‘s gloves are red leather weightlifting gloves with armored panels on the back. They have a hook & loop wrist strap with a white label that reads “HPJ” (theorized to stand for “High Prosecutor Justice”). According to the game’s lore, they were gifted to her by Lucifer and likely used in her battle with Beelzebub (she’s never depicted without them, even when eating pancakes with her hands).

I wasn’t able to find any similar products to modify online so I decided to make them from scratch.

Font Selection

I tried running my cropped screenshots of the game’s sprites through various font finders to find something similar Vanripper‘s hand drawn “HPJ” text, but wasn’t able to find anything that I liked. I ended up browsing through dafont.com manually and eventually found one I liked.

Material Selection

According to PRI Safety Gloves:

The best leather thickness for gloves ranges from 0.6 mm to 1.0 mm, depending on the type and purpose of the gloves. Thinner leather (0.6–0.8 mm) is flexible and comfortable, ideal for dress or driving gloves. Thicker leather (0.8–1.0 mm) provides durability and protection, making it perfect for work or motorcycle gloves.

Real glove making red leather is uncommon and expensive. As I plan on revisiting this project in the future with better skills and materials (I’m not made of money yet), I decided to use a cheap PU leather from Aliexpress. I was pleasantly surprised that they sold A4 sheets of the 0.7 mm faux leather in a huge range of colors. I later found that the material kind of looks and feels similar to dishwashing gloves, but I think it was appropriate for my skill and budget.

Pattern Making

If I was going to sew my own gloves, I thought I may as well tailor them to fit my hands perfectly. This meant creating the sewing patterns from scratch rather than using a read made design.

When I came across a glove making video tutorial series by Elizabeth Bond and saw that she was also making a red fingerless glove, I knew this was the perfect tutorial for me. Ensure you start from the first video to make the base glove pattern before moving onto modifying it for a fingerless glove.

In Creating a leather glove pattern part 1: The trank, Elizabeth pulls out a random number at 17:55, which is mentioned in the comments as well as addressed in the video description. If you look at the center right of my hand measurements, I divided the “difference between my closed hand measurement and double my hand width” by 4 across my fingers. Then I rounded the numbers to make my index and pinky get slightly more space. The sub-millimeter values of these numbers don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things because we’re tailoring, not engineering.

I skipped drawing the fingertips for my glove pattern as I was going to cut them off when I modified them into fingerless gloves anyway. My original thumb pattern was much too tight. I’m not sure why because I followed the tutorial exactly. In the subsequent version, I widened it, ensuring the top of the top of my fingerless thumb was at least the circumference of my thumb as written on my hand measurements. I’m not sure why Elizabeth didn’t mention this as part of the patterning process. My fourchette pattern also took a few attempts to get correct; the first one I produced was much wider than I needed.

It seems that most of tailoring is based off eyeball measurements and vibes. It’s a lot of trial and error and you don’t get better by studying formulae, but from trying over and over.

For the armor plates, I used cardboard and double sided tape to try out a couple of sizes before I settled on the final dimensions. In Vanripper‘s drawings, the gloves squash and stretch to accommodate Justice‘s various hand poses, but they had to be solid in reality. They also had to stay on but allow my hands to slip in and out of the gloves while also looking as accurate to the reference images as possible. I think I found an acceptable middle ground.

While I’d highly recommend you try patterning your own gloves, I’ve cleaned up my pattern into an SVG and uploaded it below (kinda sounds ironic though it really isn’t). As it’s a vector format, you can scale up and down without losing quality. Note that it does fit on an A4 sheet of paper, but you’ll have to reduce the margin. Also if you’re wondering what font I used, and why it feels so familiar, it’s DIN 1451.

Sewing

As instructed by Elizabeth, I first sewed the thumbs, pondered how to do the armor plates, then continued sewing the fingers and side of the glove.

The armor plates were a bit of conundrum for me. Perhaps I could make of some pliable rubber or foam so they could conform to my hand, but I decided to make them out of a thick cardboard covered in (faux) leather because that seemed the most straight forward. Then I considered how they would attach to the back of my hand. Sewing them on would be secure but they’re flat but my hands are round. If I’d completely sewn around their perimeter, the glove wouldn’t bend enough to let my hand in and out. Maybe I could sew just the middle of the plates onto my glove but I couldn’t decide where the stitches would go. In the end, I settled for hot gluing them on. I also used hot glue to wrap the (faux) leather onto the cardboard as well.

The strap was made using a strip of (faux) leather sewn in a square shape under the thumb. I used a tiny strip of double sided tape to hold it in place and sewed it in. The labels were just printed on paper and folded over the straps, with double sided tape to prevent it from unraveling. My inkjet printer is very streaky (I’ve tried everything and I can’t seem to fix it) so they don’t look great but they were the best I could do on short notice (I was finishing them off on Halloween day). I used hook & loop tape to keep them closed; the glue holds them alright, but I wouldn’t put any real pressure on them. I’d sew them in but I ran out of time; and I wasn’t planning on opening and closing them often anyway.

Future Changes

I’d like to revisit this project in the future. These gloves are very boxy so a more complex form fitting pattern give them a sleeker look and feel. Some real leather would give them a more premium look and feel. And some metal armor plates would give them a more practical tactical look and feel. Otherwise, I was very happy wearing them to Halloween dinner with my friends.