MAKE AND DO: Jack Skellington Costume
Papier Mache Head
Materials: Large balloon, newspaper, flour, water, paint brush, white spray-paint, tights/stockings, stapler.Buy a very large balloon (deflated remains in fig.1).
Tear up hundreds of strips of newspaper - about 3cm x 10cm. Any rough size is OK. (I tried bigger strips as a short cut, but they don't stick as well and they tend to bubble.)
Mix about a half a cup of flour and three cups of water. You can adjust the flour-water ratio at your discretion, depending on how thick a glue you want. I started off with a half-cup flour : 5 cups water ratio, but found it too thin. A thicker glue dries faster too.
Heat this mix on a stove.
Keep stirring the mixture, and try to make sure the flour dissolves well, don't leave any lumps.
Once it is hot and mixed, let it cool down.
Inflate your balloon.
Spread newspaper out on the floor, so you can be as messy as you like.
Put the balloon, newspaper strips and pot of glue on the newspaper.
Get some kind of soft paintbrush.
Brush paste on both sides of a strip of paper so it is very wet, and paste it onto the balloon with your hand.
Keep pasting strips on, overlapping slightly (about a quarter?), until you have covered the whole surface of
the balloon with one layer. (You can leave a gap/hole where the knot of the balloon is - this can be cut into a neck hole
later.)
Allow it to dry overnight, then paste on another layer. You can do a couple of layers in one sitting, but of you do more than two or three it will take forever to dry.
Once you have enough layers, and it is completely dry (it should feel fairly firm and very dry), burst the balloon with a pin, if you dare, and peel it off. This is the time when most of my projects (what projects?) fail and I lose my temper and kick the ball in, but it all worked, amazingly. The balloon actually peels off by itself.
Cut some slits in the neck hole, and gently bend the flaps outwards.
Try the head on, get a feel for how it will sit on your head. Have someone take a photo of you or try yourself in a mirror - no mean feat with an eye-less mask on your head, but I finally managed, as you can see below.
With the mask still on your head, scratch a mark at your eye-level. Your eye-holes will need to cross this point at the very least.
Draw the shapes of the eye-holes, nostrils, mouth on the head.
Cut the mouth and eye-holes.
Paste loads of strips in one small area to make a nose bulge. Mould it yourself, with your hands.
Buy two cans of spray-paint, go outside, set up lots of newspaper on the ground and walls and spray the whole thing
white.
Paint the nostrils again.
Buy a pair of cheap opaque black tights/nylons/stockings.
Getting the tights to stick to the mask was the most difficult part of all this. There is almost no glue that will stick nylon. After multiple attempts I just stapled the things on from the inside, reaching very awkwardly through any available orifice. Stretch the nylon over the eye and mouth holes, and staple around each hole. Paint over the staples.
Paint the stitch marks around Jack's mouth. I really rushed this bit; I'd left it 'til just before we went out, and it shows, unfortunately. It should have been the easiest part.
Bat Bow-tie
This is just cut from a big cardboard box, painted with black matte art paint, pin-stripes with white paint marker.Skeleton Gloves
Cheap white "driving" gloves (thin gloves in Japan that women wear to avoid getting a tan while driving. Useful because the go up to your upper arm. Black paint marker to paint in the "gaps" between bones.Suit
My old threadbare and ill-fitting black suit, bought for a hundred dollars in New York many moons ago, before I set off on the temp job trail. I just pinned the upper arms, lower back, and upper legs, to make the suit tight-fitting and angular. It doesn't look like the real thing, but it's not bad considering it was a baggy suit to begin with.
Hate mail here, please.
