After making latex puppet heads I decided to give sculpting and casting an old fashioned latex Halloween mask a try.
I got started by smashing a bunch of oil based clay onto a styrofoam head.
I wasn’t totally sure what kind of figure I was going to sculpt but eventually landed on some kind of pig man with a screw top metal plate.
Once the sculpt was done I was ready to cast it in plaster. Never having cast anything like this, I was a little nervous about wrecking the sculpt.
Before I had a chance to pour the mold, I ended up watching Halloween 3 Season of the Witch, which had some great footage of the interior of an actual mask factory.
Watching it I realized I’d made a huge mistake. Using a styrofoam head as a base meant I couldn’t do a single piece mold since the neck hole would be too small to pull the sculpt out. If I had done solid clay I could have just heated it all up in the oven and worked the clay out.
Since I was running out of time for Halloween, I tried to do a quick and dirty two part mold by just piling plaster on and then pulling a wire through as the plaster set up, but it ended tragically. I didn’t get the wire set in proper and the mold wouldn’t split.
It took days to get all the plaster off with a a hammer and screwdriver. Bthe time I was done, the original was pretty torn up. Fortunately, what the sculpt lost in texture it gained in roughed up character.
Doing a proper two part box mold ended up being enormous and taking about 30 pounds of plaster.
As the plaster was drying I started cutting off hunks of it so that I’d be able to lift it.
Even after shearing off ten pounds or so it still weighed a ton.
Since I didn’t have enough latex to fill the mold, I just sloshed around what I had.
The next morning it was dry enough to open the mold.
A little trimming and painting, and…
It came out great except for the fact that I didn’t realize styrofoam heads were way smaller than my human head. Since it didn’t even fit on Donna, I didn’t bother cutting eye holes so if you put it on, you’re going in blind. Either way, I’m pretty happy with it.
And so is my granddaughter.
Start to finish I learned a lot about plaster, sculpting and mask mask making. If I had to do it all over again, I’m guessing I could knock one out start to finish in a week or so, if it was in the middle of summer. Plaster takes a while to dry out enough to cast with during the rainy season.
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