the fucking uhhhhh the uh

For the folks curious about templates, these are the shapes I cut from cardboard. I added a couple little pieces of cereal box cardboard as structural support in various points, like the bridge of the nose and behind the beak. Also, I ended up cutting the forehead piece a little smaller, which I marked on the paper, but I kept the template size in case you want to see how it originally looked.

It's a completely different piece of wearable art. It has a different soul. It has a different feel.

Bear's mask templates! I just want to stress that our masks are extremely low tech and budget friendly. They're made out of cardboard, hot glue, and fleece, with an elastic band in the back. I used a little sheer black fabric I had leftover from my terror bird costume for the eyes.

Fleece and felt are very forgiving fabrics and you can basically just cut a single large piece and stretch it to fit, gluing it to the cardboard one small section at a time. The fabric was the only purchase we made for these, and it was in the form of thrift store blankets.

you have this mysterious fish that  no one really cared about, because everyone assumed they’d gone extinct with the dinosaurs. an interesting footnote, but one of many, many fossil species. 

and later the coelacanth gets some fame as a so-called “missing link” species, a theory which is now outdated (and not accurate for coelacanths) but was really influential at the time. because they have some weird biological quirks – bones in fins! – people were like “oh, they must be a missing link.” so the coelacanth was launched into some fame with the theory of evolution. it got brought up a lot. drawn in old textbooks as proof.

and then a fisherman finds a weird fish off the coast of south africa and calls a local fish expert who had let it be known she was interested in weird finds, and he brings her the (unfortunately badly rotted) corpse and she’s like “well, this is sure weird,” and sends off the bones to other experts, who start to quietly freak out, and rush to south africa, and rewards are offered for another one, any other one, and a few years later one is caught and frozen before rotting.

and it’s this incredible discovery, this extinct creature come to life (the prehistoric coelacanth lived in swamps and marshes in south america; these now are deep ocean fish in and around the indian ocean, but it’s still recognizably the same species)!

but it’s also blue.

not like, muddy blue, or tumblr-default-background blue.

Original