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Johnny
Depp
As
Cad
Bane
On
The
Planet
Of
The
Apes
or
How
Buster
Stopped
Worrying
And
Learned
To
Love
The
Skull
-In the workshop-
It’s, frankly,
easier to put up some pictures and tersely rattle
off how
I craft something, and leave the why out –
and I’m sure most
people would rather I just got to the point.
–And I have doubts I’d be doing my best as an attempted
teacher, so many
wildly varying factors going into creative decisions.
I’d rather teach artists than craftsmen,
not that art’s much good without craft, and for all that craft’s
easily taught –it’s just technique and hard work one of
which I can show and describe- while art’s
really tough.
Let’s try, then,
doing a terse demonstration with a little bit of
purely practical reasons for doing, followed by a –skippable, if you
don’t care
about creativity or are just in a time bind ATM- rambling story about
seemingly
unconnected things straddling two decades that all feed into creative why
I ended up making that skull shell base and say something about
creativity and
inspiration -
Ideas come from all sorts of places, and it’s
all connected.…
I’ll bracket the strictly practical how-to/demonstration stuff between the horizontal lines.
The
basic idea is that Sculpey –what I make most of my facial appliances
of- noses
and animal snouts are bad to crack/break/at least crumble around the
edges when
you’re prying them out of a mask, and/or some alterations are spread
thinly
around the face and impractical as loose pieces.
When the inner shell was dry and
had been separated from the base, I put
it back on the base, glued the skull on the inner layer with rubber
cement, and
ISTR that I went around the edge where it was crumbly and/or fit badly
–the
shell technique should allow a tight fit to the face and not permit
chips to
get away, so I shouldn’t have to carefully bridge gaps anymore during
the
mache-ing process- filling with new Sculpey and gave the whole shebang
20
minutes in the oven at 275 to bake the new Sculpey before I covered it
all with
two or three more layers of paper mache.
Here
it is enclosed, dried, and off the base so I could begin doing a
similar thing
with a nose appliance - but in a ¾ face form that would still need the
base to sit on…
The
teeth aren’t covered because the teeth are tricky to get the detail out
on a
mask and I wanted minimal layers smoothing out – the rest is covered
because it
holds it together if it cracks inside the sandwiching layers anyway,
and
because latex doesn’t stick to bare Sculpey very well, but loves paper
– and I’m
going to be sorry down the road when the latex over the teeth has
peeled away
so much it had to be cut out to get the wrinkles out of the way, and
the mache
gums start exposing…
I dabbed a water-and-glue-resistant layer of latex on with a finger, set it to dry, repeated later in the day, and so on for five or six days until I deemed the latex coat thick enough to resist pulling away from the substratum and/or pinching-wrinkling, and the end result was this:
I
could manage a mask on it without setting it on the base for support if
I
really had to, but it’d be
sagging under
my hands and moving around the whole time – weaker up at the arch of
the forehead, especially,
and the next time I make a full shell, I’m making the first layer thick
–
because why require it to tie up one of my bases when the shell covers
everything and I could have just made it strong enough to stand alone?
This, one, I'm trying to decide whether the trade-off is
worth it of sacrificing
that I can nest it with other shells to collectively take
little space in
storage –I’ve got a lot of bases, and the solid ones take up a lot more
room-
for strength by filling the back with some of that expanding insulation
foam that
comes in spray cans…
-And therein lies a story...
---
Young
Buster -she HATES when I call her Buster- had conceived an unreasoning
fear of some typical Halloween stuff, bad
enough to be a serious
problem. She used to be so terrified of pumpkins that she could barely leave the
house in October ---
See, it came to pass that on a visit, she and I were alone in the house when, on an episode of Bernstein Bears we were watching, some bad older boys were doing Halloween scaring stuff -and of course that upset her badly- so I explained Halloween was pretend and fake -I kept repeating that, and I proved it- I carved a jack-o’-lantern face in an apple in front of her, improvised a spider out of wire and chewed up toilet paper pulp and showed her how to make a lame Halloween ghost out of a balloon and a blanket and string- that last, just like the bad boys had used. I’ve always understood that that was the end of awkward incidents involving fear of jack-o’-lanterns/pumpkins, and made October habitable again for her family…
She certainly remembered it and thought it
helped; something like a six months to a year
later –we lived in different states at the time and didn’t see each
other
often- she asked me to carve her a skull
(her latest phobia, what with a certain pirate movie series successful
enough
that you couldn't take her anywhere without running into Johnny Depp
and associated symbols making for a real
problem) out of an apple, and this not ten minutes before
they went
home, or I’d have done it.
What
I did do was conceive of a skull mask for her
Christmas present.
I deliberately
simplified the anatomy; I
wanted to suggest a skull in a less-threatening way. Rounded
off/enlarged the
eye sockets and left out a lot of detail. Painted it myself, a flat white with no shading.
On
that previous visit, she’d noticed a crone mask (also from Touring Mayaland) where
it was propped on a dresser outside my office/workshop downstairs
- and was, naturally, afraid of it - and had someone take her downstairs every day to see it from the bottom of the stairs, a distance of over 30 feet..
That's the spot I set the skull mask up at, and the way I introduced her to it. She could control her exposure to the skull mask herself from a safe distance, and work up to it at a pace of her choosing. (Incidentally, my friend Uno, of An Unorthodox Halloween, now believes that his vast body of [excellent] Halloween art is his way of dealing with a terrible experience with death when he was eight.)
It
worked a heck of a lot faster than I'd expected
-which was a visit a day to look from a distance while she worked up
her
courage the rest of the Christmas visit- what with I've got that photo
of her
upstairs in Momma's sewing room wearing
it 20
minutes later.
---
One message of all this is that art can have intrinsic educational
value;
giving children control over a thing they irrationally fear is
effective
therapy. (Another is read to children if you want them to
grow up loving
reading, and paint, etc., with them to encourage creativity, and so
on.) -And
ideas come from all sorts of places.
---
Dialing forward a
decade (and I gave Buster a skull
candle for her 14th birthday,
fer realz) the Reverend Doctor Buster’s Daddy, my little brother, had
gotten us (himself and his rustic
carpentry, me and our older sister and our masks collaboration, and Buster and the fairies she makes now)
involved
in a local art gallery, which set off a new frenzy of
mask-making, and my first idea for something new for that -ideas
come from all sorts of places- was
inspired by the new litter of kittens, some of
whom looked a little in facial markings like masked wrestlers,
so wrestling
masks done in paper mache.
(There was also a cat mask, but that took longer - stay
tuned.)
You’d think that would be easy, but I envisioned simulating the way cloth pulled tight and evened out the features, and --- (The thumbnails all link to much larger shots in case you want a closer look)
-That was how I came to make my first shell base, not ten whole months ago. I knew the Sculpey additions around the nose weren’t going to make for something solid I could just treat as an appliance and put on the base, too many pieces too small, so I laid down a shell, did the filling in, and enclosed with more mache and coated it with latex. I just set the whole thing on the base it was made on for support, and made the mask as usual. It turned out that a shell, with some flex, is easier to pry out of a dried mask. (Here’s four dried and trimmed results.)
And
it struck me that the same method could protect and hold together some
of my
other appliances.
You
recognize the ones on either end in that last shot, of course, and the
one in
the middle had a convoluted origin.
It began with the cat mask I mentioned earlier...
-And when I posted
the last unpainted mask pic up there on my forum, someone
–looking at the muzzle, I guess- suggested
that with modifications of the cat base, do Planet of the Apes-style
ape masks. (It was Uno,
BTW.)
-And of course no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. The skull nose stuck out too far (room for a live human nose under it), too high for what I was doing. –But by luck, I’d brought along an exacto knife with my tools…
And I was struck, as I smoothed in the muzzle shape before putting an ape nose on, what a fine, Jim Starlin-esque, alien face it was as-is. In fact, Buster, who was there making fairies, said it looked like Cad Bane from Star Wars: Rebels. I decided to go with the alien thing, and make up an optional ape nose appliance later for the original idea. Back home, I did further refining and started a shell.
YES!
...And now I could work on that ape nose...
And
realized that, with the separate nose, I could have both Galen and General Urko…
And that finally closes the circle.
Ideas
come from all sorts of places, and
it’s all
connected…
---
---
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