I had to laugh when I saw that top! I used to have a picture of a Creature From The Black Lagoon figure that I made for my avatar, and I used Nuvtex textured vinyl to make the skin for it. Nuvtex is who makes most of the faux leathers that are on the market, and they are very high-quality products. I was going to use their gator skin in green, but as you can see in the picture posted earlier, the back scales are bigger than the belly scales, so I ended up going with Nuvtex Boa skin that had more of the smaller scales I needed for the Creature.
Those Nuvtex vinyls come in a bunch of different patterns and colors. You can do gator, crocodile, boa, dinosaur, rhino, and others. You can check out what all they make at
http://www.nuvtex.com/. The stuff costs a little less than $40/yard for cut yardage, but that's with a 54" width, so you get 13.5 sq ft of coverage for each yard, which is quite a bit of fabric. I bought three yards to make the 99 pieces of skin on the Creature and ended up only using about half of it. You can buy the fabric direct from them and have any local shops that do vinyl roofs make you a roof out of it just like they would using any other vinyl, so you don't need to pay extra for a kit. Or if you know how to sew, you could make your own top.
Here's the Creature in his suit. You can see the fabric lends itself pretty well to curvy, multi-angle, application.
imp_daddy:
