I LOVE THE WORLD AND EVERYTHING ELSE

As implied, this was thrown together for some late Halloween parties autumn 2025.

I knew I wanted to try my hand on this masquerade-style mask on a stick kinda deal, but inspiration was kind of slow at first. I initially wanted to do something a bit more robotic/biomechanical, but couldn't really get any ideas to crystallize.

10 days before the first upcoming party, I was pretty much resigned to wearing something from the archives, until inspiration struck while doodling in my lecture notes. While toying around with this half-and-half abstract face idea, I scribbled some molecule-looking shapes, and the thematic core of the piece quickly solidified around that! Ethanol is really quite a simple molecule, and yet one we surround with so much Stuff; Dionysus is a god of madness and theatre, too. It seemed like a fun space to play in.

At the time, I'd also been looking at a lot of early CGI renders and eclectic 80s-00s image collages (the kind of stuff that sometimes gets retroactively grouped together under the "utopian scholastic" aesthetic), which definitiely inspired my aesthetic choices.

The humanoid half of the face was done using my usual papier-mâché over plasticine method. Since I was working so fast, my documentation is a bit spotty this time — see [this post] for a more thorough breakdown of the steps.

SCULPTING

I find it helpful to start with something vaguely skull-shaped just to get the proportions down, then gradually build and refine the features. There's a lot of "adding a chunk of clay, pushing it around a bunch, then ultimately carving away most of it".

Here is the sculpt all smoothed and ready to be coated in paper strips and glue! Features are slightly exaggerated and over-trimmed to account for the thickness of the pulp that's about to go over it. In hindsight, I wish I'd pushed the asymmetry of his nose and the wobbliness of his mouth a touch more here. I feel like they got kinda lost in the final result.

PAPIER-MÂCHÉ

I start with a sacrifical layer of tissue paper and my usual homecooked potato-starch-based wallpaper paste. Next, a layer of newspaper for stability and to give the pulp something to adhere to.

Paper pulp, aka yummy yummy egg carton and glue smoothie. Clay sculpting tools come in handy here too, to capture creases and get the edges as crisp as possible.

I left the pulp to dry for approx. 24 hours before removing from the base. This part —where the piece has to shed everything but its skin— is always the scariest to me. This guy didn't come off cleanly, I really had to get in there and carve up the sculpt. I've found that the best way to get rid of the plasticine greasiness on the inside is to completely peel off the innermost layer, that's why the tissue paper is there.

This is the ugly lumpy stage where you really have to trust the process. I sanded down the worst of the bumps, then trimmed the mask and cut out the eyeholes.

EARFUL INTERMISSION

For this project, I really wanted to push the envelope on how much detail can be captured using only papier-mâché. In my earlier pieces, ears have usually been mostly air-dry clay, sometimes over a simple paper pulp cup shape. For this one, the ear is fully papier-mâche strips, and hollow on the inside!

Same as the main face, I started with a clay base over a simple wire loop, then covered it in tissue paper and newspaper strips.

Once dry, I opened it up and hollowed it out from the back —there's a bit of a scar if you know to look for it, but overall I'm pleasantly surprised by how well this worked; I do think this is the best ear I've ever made for a sculpt!

The eyeball was made similarly, over a simple ball of plasticine stuck onto the end of a spare modelling tool.

CLAY AND PRIMING

The teeth were really the only part of this project where I had to rely fully on air-dry clay! Back in the day, I would probably have done at least his lips and eyelids in clay too. The main benefits of doing as much as possible in paper is that it cuts down on weight a lot, and allows for more flexible sculpting. I've also noticed some cracking in my older masks with clay-pulp interfaces that recieve a lot of stress, though not as much as expected.

The clay is also useful for filling in dimples in the pulp. It looks only a little like he's had some kind of spaghetti incident.

I attached his ear by gluing in a new wire loop inside it and anchoring the ends to the inside of the mask, then smoothing over the seam with some paper strips and glue. I've done a lot of pulp-over-strips, but this was the first time I've really done a strips-over-pulp bond; I wasn't sure if it was going to adhere as well, but it turned out fine!

I hit him with a few more rounds of sanding, then primed it with several coats of mod podge. Like last time, I put red tissue paper decoupage on the inside to cover up the ear wire and make it look a bit neater.

A GREEBLED INTERLUDE

The ethanol molecule is made from spun pulp balls, primed with mod podge and painted, then connected with wooden skewers. The early-CGI-flavour checkerboard was made with the chipboard backing from an old drawing pad.

His pinecone earring references a [thyrsus]! I was planning to add some fake ivy to complete the look, but it ended up looking a bit too busy. adn the plastic flowers richly symbolize Whatever Was Available At The Thrift Store 👍 but they way they kind of frame the face in the final piece kind of make them look like the little star-shaped squeans used to indicate inebriation in cartoons. That wasn't planned, but I like it.

The handle comes from a thrifted spoon and ladle set! With some help from my dad, I topped it with a brass rod from the hardware store.

In my concept sketches, I added a lot of random ornamentation to the handle without reflecting on the fact that I would have no way to make that a reality. I had pretty much accepted that I'd have to settle for a plain rod, but my dad happened to have the perfect ornament in his scrap collection, taken from a table his coworker was throwing out!

I originally wanted to stain the handle a darker colour, but the stuff I picked out didn't play nice with the wood grain on my test piece. I'll leave wood staining for projects with less looming deadlines.

PAINTING AND PARTYING

At this point I was in such a rush to get the mask done that I didn't really get a lot of photos, but I used pretty much the same techniques as in [@], starting with a red underpainting and building up the skin in layers to add depth. The biggest difference is I supplemented my usual 6-colour warm/cool primary palette with some yellow ochre and burnt sienna, but I honestly don't think it made much of a difference in the final result.

Hhhhhowever, I discovered an issue on the morning of the day of the party. I had spent the night painting the skin by the warm-leaning light of my desk lamp, and as I held him up in the natural light pouring through my windows.....

yeah no this is Not It

I spent a few hours adjusting the skin and finishing up the checkerboard and eyeball, before hot-gluing everything together. I hadn't varnished him and there were some parts I would have liked to polish more, but well, he was wearable, and I had a train to catch. I slapped together a sufficiently silly outfit out of stuff from my wardrobe, and headed out. :]

All in all, it took me just 10 days to take something from a pile of egg cartons and thrift finds to a wearable piece — the fastest of any of my masks, all while juggling daytime studies at the same time. I wouldn't recommend it 👍 I had to listen to a frankly inhumane amount of 2010s club music to keep myself hyped during the process.

ALL THOSE PARTS I WANTED TO POLISH MORE

The mask was fine at this point, but now that I wasn't on a time crunch there were some aspects of it I wanted to refine to make it feel more "finished".

I redid the checkerboard and molecule entirely, to add more texture to the marble and create some visual interest through different atom sizes. I did my classic "drop the thing your painting straight onto a glob of blue paint" move back when doing the eye, so I tried my best to cover that up and hit it with an extra layer of glossy varnish.

I touched up his eyebrows and makeup to give them some more visual weight, but unfortunately I couldn't get any photos during this: my 8-year-old phone battery gave out in the cold and damp while I was biking between thrift stores, looking for props for the photoshoot :( I debated long and hard over whether I should add painted highlights to the eyelid and lips. Ultimately, I'm glad I did; pushing the features slightly more towards cartooniness helped the skin texture seem more real in comparison.

He also got some luscious construction paper lashes, gold leaf freckles, a bigger pinecone, and a sturdier chain.

The last part I added was the wrist loop! I initially wanted some slightly more delicate hardware and leather, but couldn't find anything that fit the bill. It turned out a bit more bondage-looking than I was envisioning, but well, I don't think it's unfitting. The big flashy brass ring helps tie the whole piece together, too.

PHOTOSHOOT!

I've had multiple irl aquaintances ask me where these photos were taken. It's club My Bedroom, and brother I go every night

It's all smoke and mirrors! My apartment is frustratingly narrow, which limits me a bit in which shots I can get without having to use an unflatteringly short focal length.

People keep gifting me LED light strips, which I got to put to use for this. The spots of refracted light in the final images are coming not from the disco ball I'm posing with, but from a teardrop prism being illuminated by a homebrewed pin light (bike lamp in a cardboard tube). The rest of the lighting is nothing fancy, just my normal desk/reading lamps pointed at the ceiling in an attempt to create a large diffuse light + a homebrewed reflector made with tin foil.

I got some friends to help me with the setup and some of the photography! Usually I have to set up my camera's timer myself, then rush to get into position before it goes off. It's nice to have someone to help instead, and to keep you company as you slowly descend into photography-induced madness — all in all, I ended up with 1600+ photos over the course of three sessions. After sorting through them, I was seeing this fucker every time I closed my eyes.

ASSORTED THOUGHTS

This guy has probably the most realistic human face out of all of my creations, and certainly the strongest and most identifiable facial expression. I like it, it gives him a lot of personality. It feels nice to have made something that is unambiguously happy to exist, for once.

Playing with the uh. wearer-mask boundary was core to this piece. Most of my masks aren't well suited for social interaction; when I wear them, they limit my sight and hearing. When I take them off, they become inert; I am visibly "out of costume". I wanted to challenge this by placing the "objectness" of this piece front and center — to highlight the functional parts, integrating them as part of the character, too. I can lower the mask and look someone in the eye, yet he remains, wood and brass and flesh. It creates an interesting tension.

The overall construction wasn't super well thought out. Ideally, I would have planned the placement of the rod a bit more carefully — the way it ended up, it occupies a bit too much of the inside, making it hard to hold the mask flush against my face.

Vision through the mesh parts (undereye crease and iris) isn't great, but it does help with depth perception! I'll take what I can get honestly

I should sit down and do some practice swatches of skin with different undertones and pigmentation, to get a sense of how underpainting and paint pigments contribute to the final appeareance. As it is now, I feel like I still have to do a lot of trial and error every time until I arrive at a decent match to my own flesh.

I'd still like to explore some of the biomechanical stuff from the early concept doodles... maybe someday it will be time for PARTYMACHINE 9000 or whateverthefuck to shine

I locked in too hard writing this and forgot to make dinner, which wasn't very thematically appropriate of me. Person reading this, consider grabbing a snack. eat some grapes

And as always, feel free to shoot me an ask if you have any questions about my process!

Prefacing this by saying that this isn't intended as a tutorial — I hope to make a proper how-to someday, but until then you're free to contact me if there's a particular part of my process you'd like to know more about :]

Plasticine base sculpt

Most of my masks and larger sculptures start life as a clay base, over which I then layer the papier mâché. My recent ones use a water-soluble plasticine, which allows me to apply the paper directly to the base without having to prevent the clay from drying out or adhering to the paper.

Papier mâché strips

I begin by layering tissue paper brushed with wallpaper paste over the sculpt to capture every nook and cranny, followed by a layer of newspaper strips for structure and to give the paper pulp something to adhere to.

Papier mâché pulp

The main structure of the mask is made out of papier mâché pulp — essentially a thick smoothie of soaked blended newspaper and/or egg carton and a whole lot of wallpaper paste and wood glue (use solvent-free stuff!!). This mask is all egg carton, which is easier to work with as the fibers are shorter to begin with. My previous stuff is all newspaper, though! It works just as well but requires a bit more processing to get a smooth result.

Even though this isn't a tutorial, I feel the need to stress that when working with paper pulp, DO NOT dispose of the leftover water directly into your plumbing — it is still full of miniscule paper fibers that WILL clog your pipes Big Time. Either let the water evaporate, or strain it several times through a tightly woven fabric.

Sanding, clay details and lining

After cleaning off the plasticine residue, I brush down the inside of the mask with a few layers of Mod Podge for stability, then trim it and sand the outside as smooth as I can. I use air-dry paper clay to fill any dimples and to sculpt any details too intricate to be done in pulp.

My previous masks are just plain paper on the inside, but I decided to give this one a nice meaty lining with some decoupage :)

Painting

I've been experimenting with some new methods for creating depth and texture in skin — my older masks have an even-colored base blushed with makeup pigments, which tends to look a bit flat. For this one, I instead tried to think more about the layers and properties of real flesh, working my way up from a red underpainting. I use acrylic paints mixed with different ratios of water and matte gel medium. I've never used the gel stuff before, but frankly I didn't find it made much of a difference, aside from making my brush strokes more visible. Maybe I should have gone for the glossy stuff instead? :/

Varnish, mesh and fastening

Once the paint is dry, I give the mask a few layers of matte liquid varnish for protection, then a light brushing of gloss for a realistic sheen.

Finally, I install the eye mesh and fastening! The mask stays on using a small wire hook that allows me to hang it on a fake, clip-on septum piercing. It's very lightweight, so this doesn't hurt unless I get it caught on something (Do Not use a real piercing as an anchor). I hit the inside with another layer of decoupage to make it look a bit tidier, then several more coats of Mod Podge to protect it from the moisture of my breath.