Becoming a Death Eater - Part 3

Dried Mold

Day 3 into my Death Eater Mask project. After waiting the required 24 hours for the plaster to dry I was ready to start the fun part, sculpting the mask.  Even though this is the part I have been most excited about, I am also a little nervous.  So far there have been a few bumps along the way but I finally have a solid mask.  Now I just have to make sure I dont mess it up!

I have done a fair bit of searching around on the internet for some reference images.  I was lucky enough to find a site with pictures of all of them over at kaiseremblog.  This turned out to be really helpful since I could see various version in one place.

Adding the PaperClay

I was not 100% sure of the look I was going for but I had decided on a few things;  I wanted the mouth piece to be a bit different, and I wanted strong cheek bones and brows.  Before I could get to any of that I had some prep work to do.  As you can see from the first image, the dried mask was a bit rough.  Paying a bit more care when applying the plaster strips I might have been able to start out with a smoother surface.

After a slow start with the PaperClay I eventually found a good method of working with it.  Though the directions dont mention it, keeping your fingers damp is the key.  I filled up a ramekin with some water to keep handy.  Using a small brush I also lightly coated the mask with some water as I began applying the PaperClay.  At this point my only goal was to cover the entire surface and get the face smoothed out.  With as much material as it was taking to cover the surface I stated to think I was going to use the entire package.  I ended up having at least 1/4 left.

Assembling the mouth piece

Once I had the entire surface covered I started working on my mouth piece.  The PaperClay is easy to work with but I needed something to support the weight across the open area of the mouth.  I took a little break and paid a visit to Starbucks and left with a Venti coffee and a few extra stir sticks.  These had the right width I was looking for and are pretty light weight.  I used a pair of snippers to cut them down to size and angle the edges.  Once I got everything cut I used a hot glue gun to attach all of the sticks together.

I ended up having to build up the area around the mouth so my newly created mouth piece had a good flat surface to be attached to.  Over this I applied additional Paper Clay to give it some shape.

Finished with the basic look

Now I ad some more waiting to do.  The package says the material takes from 1-3 days to dry depending on the thickness.  We shall see!  In the next post I will cover sanding and applying the facial carvings found on the Death Eater masks.

Becoming a Death Eater - Part 2

Way too excited

After thoroughly scrubbing all of the plaster from my face and hair, a good nights sleep and a day of work we were ready to have another go at creating a Death Eater mask.  This time around my wife was all set to be the test subject.  I am not sure she plans on actually wearing the mask in the parade but I figured I could use a little practice on applying the plaster before I attempted to make a mold of my sons face for his mask.

Much more still then I was

We did learn a few things from our first go around.  My wife was all ready with her shower cap, tucking as much of her hair underneath as she could manage.  the rest we applied Vaseline over.  Another step we took to make the process go a bit smoother was to cut a larger variety of sizes from the pieces of old t-shirt.  This would save us time during the application and hopefully not cause the plaster waiting to be applied to dry as much.

The nose, mouth and eyes turned out to be a little tricky.  I wanted to get as close and as much covered as possible but without suffocating my wife! It might not be easy to tell from the photos but it turns out i made to much of an effort in strengthening the edges.  Once the mask dried and came off these turned out to be almost a half inch thick.  I will just have to incorporate that into my design.

The next phase I am really excited about, sculpting the look of the mask.  More on that in Becoming a Death Eater - Part 3.

Scary

Think she was happy it came off

Becoming a Death Eater - Part 1

Every Labor day weekend my family and I attend the Dragoncon Parade in Atlanta.  And every year without fail we talk about how cool it would be to actually be in the parade.  Within a day or two all conversation on the subjects falls away until the next year rolls around.  Not this year!  Well ok, not net year, 2013.

Since we all want to experience it together we decided we had to come up with costumes in a group.  That really left only two options; Star Wars or Harry Potter, as both are almost a religion in our family.  Being a Jedi would be cool but I decided to go for something a little more sinister - a Death Eater.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows release

Choosing characters from Harry Potter was also an easier choice as my oldest daughter already has a really cool Ravenclaw house robe we had made some years back.  Much better then the kind you can find in the stores.  My wife was also already in the process of making two more robes for a Harry Potter event early next year.

It was time for me to get started on my costume.  I had stumbled across a good tutorial and source of inspiration from a blog post by The Diggingest Girl. She made it look easy!  I was soon to find out that was not the case. At least not on my first attempt.

The blog post really only called for two items I needed to purchase, PaperClay and  E-Z Form Plaster Cloth Wrap. I was not able to locate the E-Z Form at my local Michael's so I had decided to use an old cut up t-shirt dipped in standard plaster.  The 4 lbs. bucket of plaster cost me about $5 and the PaperClay was around $10.

All lubed up

To prepare I thoroughly covered my face and the top of my hair with vasoline, so the plaster would be easy to remov and not stick to my hair.  In hindsight I needed to use more Vaseline on my beard and hairline as removing the mask was a painful process.

Starting to add the plaster soaked strips

I enlisted the aid of my wife and youngest daughter to apply the plaster soaked strips.  If you have never had a mold made of your face, I must say, it's quite an experience feeling the plaster harden.  The issue we were running into was that no matter how small the batches of plaster we prepared it kept hardening faster then my wife could keep up.

Eventually she took to adding a bit more water then the instructions called for.  I think this turned out to be our biggest mistake.  Though the base layer had hardened quite well middle layers were still wet even though we waited a good deal of time for it to dry.  At one point we even used a blowdryer to speed up the process.

Waiting for the plaster to dry

When I was convinced the paster had to be dry enough I attempted to remove the mold only to find it was stuck in certain places, caught up in my hair.  Between the extra pulling I had to do to remove my hair from the plaster and the wet inner layers the mask fell apart.  Unfortunately I did not get any pictures of that.  It looked like someones face peeling off layer by layer.

We were somewhat dismayed by how things turned out but we all had fun in the process and were in no way ready to give up.  We made a list of our lessons learned and prepared for our next attempt.  This time with my wife being the modle.  More on that in Becoming a Death Eater - Part 2

Still waiting

Blank Canvas

Welcome to my new blog!  With 3 kids, a house, Girl Scouts and the never ending cycle of holidays seems like we are always making or building something.  I suspect my Facebook friends might be tired of seeing al the photos so I jave hooked up a new outlet.

I have a good backlog of projects to post and a few current ones that are just now taking shape.  More to come!