Masks

I recently rediscovered a fun craft from my childhood: masking plaster masks.  With performance costumes and Christmas gifts in mind, I bought a roll of plaster fabric and spent a messy evening with my darling making masks.  I haven't yet decided how I want to paint this first mask... but I'm thinking that a blue-ish grey base with blue shading and perhaps some glitter might be neat...

There are a few tricks to making a good sturdy, organic-looking plaster mask of a human or humanoid face. 

First of all, wrap your hair in plastic wrap and coat all exposed skin and hair with Vasline.  Then begin the mask by making an "X" with 6 thin strips of the fabric over the "third eye" part of your forehead, across the bridge of the nose, and onto the cheekbones.  This gives the mask strength and will keep it from caving in as you peel it off of your Vaseline-covered face.  Then proceed to building the edges, and finally filling in the space in between with overlapping strips.  Smooth the wet fabric out as you go to create a uniform texture.

The second is to remove the mask from your face after you've established a solid base, but before you begin adding on shapes, such as the beak-like nose of my mask.  It will be easier for you to shape the features of your mask after it is off of your face.  You can place the mask on your face to see how it looks on you periodically as you build.

The third is to imagine the features of the face you want to create in terms of shapes.  For instance, when building the large cheekbones of my mask, I overlapped different sized triangles of the fabric the build the contour of the cheek as opposed to strips or rectangles.   For the nose, I bunched up small pieces of the fabric into cones of progressively smaller size, alternating with thin overlapping strips to build strength.  

The last is to try to follow the natural contours of your own face as much as possible when designing the edges.  You want the mask to seemingly fade into the rest of your face, neck, or hairline.  Blunt or creative edges can be a cool effect for a mask, but they don't go over very well when you're trying to create a human or humanoid face. 

I highly recommend trying out this simple and fun form of sculpture... even if you have no place to wear the mask, they look super creepy and neat hanging on walls and resting on mantels!