Masks and other Art

[Buster's Uncle]

That there's a Real Dog, Alkie.


I'm posting some stuff I made substantial comments to go with now, because I don't want to be going back searching every time I get around to wanting to post.

My mom has been occasionally making life-size paper mache' men to sit in cars with women driving alone (she's a doll artist and I don't think this is really any different). I started collaborating with her a few of them ago, because my faces are a lot better. The one before last, I took several pictures of it in process. This is built on a stick frame, something new she was trying successfully, and the hands are my work. The head was both of us, and the rest is all Momma. Enjoy.

The faces are essentially my masks filled in - she did one, at first on her own, by using a casting of my face for the top, and Mylochka's for the rest -my mold stopped at the top of my face fur- and I pitched in building up the jawline to masculine proportions with pulp covered in paper strips..

EDIT: See my next post for the other three attachments...

[Rusty Edge]

I see a lot of X's.

[Metaliturtle]

I think Buncle lives in "That house"

[Buster's Uncle]

I see a lot of X's.

Dang.  You're not logged in at the Pond, then.  I should have thought of that.  I'll do an edit and attach.

[Rusty Edge]

I logged out when I left and deleted my bookmarks.

So that's how the X's work? Somebody links a picture to a site where I don't belong?

[Buster's Uncle]

Something about the vBulletin settings - attachments are only displayed while you're logged in these days, which is why I'm curerently logged in while I search, and didn't notice.  -Didn't used to be like that, and I blame that lazy jerk Donald.

[Buster's Uncle]

Uno, since you encouraged me in the past to post pictures of my sculpture-type work here, this is a shot I call Diego, Diego & Diego. Left to right is Dora the Explorer's friend, my sister's dog and a mask I made of Mexican muralist Diego Rivera- also known as Frieda Kahlo's husband. The latter two are connected, as I created the mask for a show about Frieda Kahlo my sister was putting on.

...And I call this one "Frida, Frida - Fritos". I'm eating the prop right now.

There's an actual mask of Kahlo I made later for one of Mylochka's shows - but a half-mask, and I don't have a copy if I don't find a pic.  She made me do one full-face, but it wasn't very good...

[Buster's Uncle]

So, I mentioned a while back about Buster being afraid of skulls. The &^%$#@! innerwebs just ate a nice long post about my careful program of desensitizing her, (she was so afraid that you couldn't take her anywhere without running into Johnny Depp and a certain pirate movie(s); it was a real problem).

 It isn't supposed to be anatomical; I wanted to suggest a skull in a less-threatening way. Rounded off/enlarged the eye sockets and left out a lot of detail. I let her control her first exposure to it, set up to be seen from a safe distance - and wonder of wonders, it did the trick! I finally found a picture of the mask. This was taken half an hour later:

(Click to embiggen)


(Uno then posts a pic of Talia in a t-shirt w/ a skull design.)

See, that t-shirt would have been exactly the problem; Buster would have seen someone wearing that and turned it into a great big thing. She used to be so terrified of pumpkins that she could barely leave the house in October - until, as a demonstration (after a Halloween episode of Bernstein Bears) of how it was all pretend, I carved a jack o'lantern out of an apple in front of her...

See, we were alone in the house when some bad older boys were doing Halloween scaring stuff on that cartoon, so I carved the face in the apple, made a spider out of wire and chewed up toilet paper and showed her how to make a lame Halloween ghost out of a ballon and a blanket - just like the bad boys had used.  It worked so well that years later she asked me to make something new she was afraid of.  Her parents were quick to destroy the apple and the spider when they got home - one was dangerous pokey wire and the other still perfectly good food, so I won't kick about it.

...Incidentally, Buster's Aunt made me make her six more, which she painted as Day of the Dead masks. This is the wall over her desk in her office at college:

[Buster's Uncle]

I'd really been hoping to find that shot of Buster wearing the skull mask so soon after I first showed it to her, so very happy about that.

...I had a mask that I'd done off the casting of Mylochka's face (which I always called "Dead [Mylochka]" because of the uncanny valley effect it had once I coated it in latex [w/ realistic colors because artist w/ OCD tendancies] for ease of mask separation) that I'd painstakingly painted with fleshtone latex and shading to match the base, and which I later gave to Buster once upon a time as part of a mask goodie horde I'd taken her on a visit.  She'd never put it on, preferring all the bare newsprint masks, until it was close at hand when her mother was in the room, whereupon she held it over her face and growled.  They later painted it something garish, to my colossal regret at seeing good (and hard and lengthy) work covered up - but I suppose that was necessary part of letting her control the things she feared...

[Rusty Edge]

...  They later painted it something garish, to my colossal regret at seeing good (and hard and lengthy) work covered up - but I suppose that was necessary part of letting her control the things she feared...

Who is "her"? Buster or your Wacko-in-law?

[Buster's Uncle]

Both a thing I have absolutely no criticism of my sister-in-law for is that she painted things under her daughter's direction from a very early age.  This is a basic getting-them-started-and-interested-and-confident later thing.  The child just turned 12, and is already a pretty credible painter...

[Buster's Uncle]

SO - when Uno was making his boy Alex some Alexander the Great armor, I explained how to make good helmet plumes.  (I'm no SCAer, but I LUVs me some armor, and I worked this out for myself long ago.)

Tough to describe, but roughly, you cut some foot-long lengths of rope -maybe 8-10, but it depends on the thickness of the rope- loop them through whatever's attaching them to the helmet (I tied them to a small bracket I'd riveted onto the helmet) and tie them into a bundle. Start unraveling the strands. (This part is easy, but takes forever.) When you've finished, tie a hangman's knot an inch or two wide around the base - it hides the attachment and covers a multitude of sins - and start brushing out the strands.

 For a Grecian look, you wanna go a lot shorter than I did. I was aiming for a medieval knight look. Too get a good Greek fan/bush look, you really ought to fold the lengths of rope along another length, sandwiched/sewn to a strip of leather.

 Hold on - I'll see what I can sketch in a hurry. I wish my helmet wasn't a thousand miles away.

(My helmet is no longer 1,000mls away:)







(That's all hammered out by hand w/o special tools or training from roughly 14 gauge sheet aluminum the month Buster was born on the back of a common home workshop vise - I wracked up my right arm for a couple years doing it.  Never again.)

Sounds a little more involved than I really have time for. (Wed was the original due date on this, but it got pushed back to next week)

It may be. The unraveling and brushing is time consuming.


 Here's a very rough representation of the plume I made for my helmet:

And without the hangman's knot wrapping the base:

And here's the basic idea for the Greek-style plume. The rope is in black and the thick wire it's folded over is reddish and the leather it's to be sandwiched between is yellowish:

 

Now, I find myself wishing I was back in America, where I have the raw materials and tools, so I could try to make a brush plume...

Hmmm.

[Buster's Uncle]

A thing I'm struggling with as I skim through Uno's Halloween workshop is resisting the urge to stop and look and read - how many hours have I been reposting quotes today?  I have to selfishly scan for my avatar and only look at those posts; and trying to do that, I'm only on page 67 of eighty-some...

Uno, I was reminded to ask Mom to find a picture of one of the macramé owls we did in the late 70s.  Me and my little brother made $100 dollars apiece one summer making nice macramé plant hangers that an older cousin was selling at work for $2 a pop, when they were worth 5-10 times more even at 1977 prices.  We were 10 and 12, roughly, and thought we were making out like bandits.  I started my first bank account.

[Unorthodox]

ok, what's that fake body made of?

[Buster's Uncle]

Stick frame (with eyelet joints, IIRC) some cardboard under the foam rubber - the white bodysuit is really part of the structure/support/joints, too.

She did quite a few over the years with pure paper mâché over cardboard, w/ embedded cloth & duct tape joints, but those were a lot heavier...  This way was my idea, and she ended up liking it better.