BuBbY: October 2009

This mask was made using a store-bought mask blank. I know you've all seen this one, it's just a blank white face with two eyes, two small nostrils and a squarish mouth slit.

I glued a handmade paper over the surface of the mask. The paper is black with little bits of gold leaf and tinsel in it. I trimmed the edges of it to match the mask once the glue dried.

Then I glued on a strip of maribou feather for hair. This went on even easier than the mask surface, as the paper held the glue better. Small pieces of gold webbing were glued over the eyes on the inside of the mask. A gold paint pen was used to outline the eyes and to paint the lips.

Artistically, I'm really happy with it. To wear, it's just ok. These masks only wear as well as the generic form fits your face. I find it gets kinda close and humid very soon in it. The eye effect is nice, but my own eyelashes brush the webbing when I wear the mask which is a little distracting.

I made a second mask using a pre-made mask form, this one was just a half mask. I had a big hackle of maribou that I was all set to use, and fringe, so that gave the basic shape to the mask.

For the mask face surface, I used Friendly Plastic. It heats up in hot water, becoming stretchy and then hardens again when it cools. I had a bunch of pink glitter FP that I got on sale or something, so I decided to use it for the mask.

The nice edge on the feathers and the fringe made gluing all the trims onto the plastic easy. The plastic stuck pretty well to the fabric-like surface of the mask, but I glued it in a few places for good measure. I glued fabric on the inside as a lining too.

Artistically I was happy with this mask, and it wore pretty well. The only thing was the plastic made the face part of it pretty heavy. It's not a mask for a long night out.

Wanting to make masks that fit better and where I could design all the facial features, I turned to papier-mache to make my mask bases. Since I was taking a mask-making class in college, I got to make a plaster cast of my face.

Once I had the cast sculpture of my face, making a mask form became a case of putting plasticine on the casting and then sculpting it into the face I wanted the mask to have. By working on a form of your own face, you automatically have the fit working.

Once the sculpture part was done, the papier-mache was made using torn brown paper grocery bags and a mix of 50/50 Elmer's Glue and water. You want to tear the paper bags into small pieces. DO NOT CUT THE PAPER BAG. You really need the torn, rough edge to make successful mache, a cut edge won't dry flat and your mask will have little ends curling up all over it. By overlapping these little torn bits of paper, you actually wind up building a very strong and lightweight structure.

Papier-mache masks can then be painted with gesso and sanded (you'll need to do a few coats) which will make the surface totally smooth and blank, ready for any sort of art finishing. I've also done masks where I used tissue paper, and the mask coloring forms naturally with the application of the colored tissue paper. Masks like that take a LOT of layers to be strong enough. Handmade papers from Japan and India are fantastic for mask-making.

The half-mask here was built of grocery bag papier-mache and then painted with an acrylic paint to seal it against moisture as well as decorate it. A tiny round of feathers, meant for hats, was cut in two and the pieces were glued into the deep eye sockets to make the wild eyelashes.

I will mention one mask I made this way where I didn't hardly build up the features much from my own. The finished mask fit so tightly to my own face, I couldn't move it hardly or talk while wearing it, so don't be afraid to exaggerate those facial features a bit more. It makes for a much better mask wearing experience.

For most of my years of mask-making, I tended to make masks that didn't fit over my glasses. However, I got tired of not being able to see where I was going, and I'm really more of an eyeglass girl than a contact lens girl.

I was sitting in on a class on masks given at a WesterCon when the topic of using sheet foam for making masks came up. The foam is lightweight, slightly cushy, flexible and can be molded a bit when heated using an embossing tool that blows hot air. I hadn't used this material for masks before, but I was determined to when I got home from the convention.

This is the second foam-based mask that I've made, and it took me about an hour and used less than $5 worth of materials! I enlarged the Squidoo logo and traced a paper pattern to get my shapes. I glued those bits together with a glue that works on foam. Then I used markers to add the details and taped the mask onto my own eyeglasses! If you don't wear glasses like I do, it would be easy to glue this sort of mask onto a pair of cheap sunglasses with the lenses snapped out.