Carved Foam Sasquatch Mask

The original Shannon costume was a fantastic success, and in my capacity as a painter I've included her as a character subject in several works. In fact, I'm going to be opening a show in 2027 that utilizes a number of paintings inspired by, and adjacent to, my costume work.

When that show happens, I very much want to display some of the relevant costumes on mannequins in the gallery, but I have a very reasonable fear that some of the masks - such as the original Shannon mask - will prove too cumbersome and top-heavy.

Until now, all of my masks have been paper mache, which I love, but it's hard and heavy. One possible solution, I thought, would be to remake the masks out of lighter weight material. Which sounds fine, but heck, I've never done anything like that before.

This Halloween, taking a brief break from working on the show, I decided to wear the Shannon costume again. But I would make an all-new head for her, from polyethylene foam.

The most useful, specific tool was the hot knife; this entire project would have been a zillion times harder without it. Barge cement was not the only glue I tried, but it was the best! Lots of dropcloths, stick pins, wooden skewers, and floral pins were also helpful, since I had them around anyway.

Carving foam is unexplored territory for me, so the first thing I did was look for message boards and videos that might set me on a successful path. At the very least, they could help me invest in the appropriate materials and make fewer mistakes, right? That's how I discovered that Barge cement seemed to be the adhesive of choice, and that a hot knife sounded like an indispensable tool. I also found this video, the first part of a short series, which gave me some idea of what I might expect. There wasn't a ton of one-to-one correlation between our projects, but I still felt like I could apply a lot of what I was seeing. If you, like me, are just barely dipping a toe into this stuff, I recommend checking out her work!

Polyethylene foam is pretty expensive to buy, but it is frequently used as packing material and people just throw that stuff away. I was fortunate that in September, a new piece of equipment came to my job, elaborately packed in PE foam. I took the whole lot!

I was also fortunate to find a 'used' Romech hot knife that had seemingly never actually been used at all.

To get started, I just began constructing a box that would accommodate my head (with glasses!) All of the construction is a bit slow, because you must apply a thin layer of cement to each piece, and allow it to dry for several minutes (or longer) before putting them together. And I tend to rush it a bit, so don't do that.

Anyhow, soon I had a boxy shape, and started the freewheeling process of hacking at it with a hot knife. Figuring out how the foam and knife reacted with each other was an important part of this activity - for example, I quickly learned that if you allow a molten bit of foam to drop onto the foam surface, it will melt its way in and cause pitting.

There are fewer pictures for this part of the build, because my hands were mostly gloved and dripping with contact cement. And it was messy, because there was a whole lot of trial and error happening.

I make masks out of paper mache, and whenever you want to change things in paper mache, you can easily add or subtract material. With foam, it's much harder to correct the problem if you cut away too much. And to add material, you have to overcompensate and then carefully carve it down! The process is not exactly hard, but it's far less intuitive for me at this point.

Stick pins and wooden skewers were quite useful for sticking things together temporarily, while I sorted out the various steps. Developing the features, I knew that her brows, nose, ears, and bangs were going to be separate pieces that would be attached later; the sticks made it much easier to edit them successfully!

The primary tool for all of this work was the hot knife. It's pretty versatile and amazingly useful. I'm not saying it would be impossible to do without the hot knife, but I would have had way less fun. The knife requires essentially no force at all, so it cuts out most of the actual labor involved.

I sacrificed a few hunks of foam to practice cutting with the knife, and after that I dove in and just started making parts. I drew directly on the foam using a permanent marker, and then carved out what I needed with the hot knife.

Some notes on the construction:

1: This would have been much simpler if I had a gigantic block of foam to carve. Instead, I have to glue together stacks of foam slices and then carve the shape. For her bouffant, for example, I spent a significant amount of time constructing the shape (stripiness clearly visible in the photos) instead of being able to simply cut into it.

2: If I were designing a foam mask from scratch, she wouldn't look like this. Trying to reproduce the paper mache design out of foam was a weird approach; I frequently felt like I was fighting against the material, because I didn't design the face with the material in mind.

Furthermore, the character had evolved a bit in the paintings after the original mask was finished. While I kept that mask next to me for reference as I worked, I was also conscious of being influenced by the act of drawing Shannon. She was the same sasquatch, but she was changing.

3: Some of the foam seemed to have a 'grain' to it, like it was directional. It was possible to sand it, but in one direction it would come out kind of clean, and in the other direction it would be rather shaggy.

4: The foam was sufficiently responsive to heat that, in some cases, I could detail it by running a butane lighter over the surface to soften it, and then shape or smooth the surface using my fingertips.

For the ears, I started by simply holding a piece of foam up to the side of her face, and drawing what seemed like the right shape. Once the basic outline was cut out, I could trace it onto a second piece of foam to make a roughly symmetrical copy.

I didn't expect the materials to favor a lot of really fine detail, but I used a linoleum knife to carve out some ear designs and then refined them with direct heat.

It wasn't long before I had enough mask to try it on and make sure that I wasn't completely off base. There was some sculpting to do yet, but it was nice to get some pictures from all sides and realize that it was actually coming together all right.

While I was gaining some moderate confidence regarding the foam construction, I knew that there was a whole gigantic other step that I hadn't learned yet. Because this whole darn thing was going to have to be covered in fabric when it was finished.

I purchased a yard each of a turquoise fleece and a brown fleece, from a sixty inch wide bolt. This proved to be sufficient, although I did get nervous near the end and order a second yard of the turquoise. I'll use it at some point.

For some reason, I chose to tackle the ears first. I guess because they were ready first, but it was kind of a dumb move since it was obviously going to be the hardest part to wrap successfully. They were awkward and irregular and it worked, but I basically felt like I learned nothing from the process that was transferable as a skillset.

Well, almost nothing. I didn't sew all the seams right away, because this was where I learned that I was going to need a curved needle to get this job done. I had never used one, but it was immediately clear that hand-stitching around some of these shapes was going to be virtually impossible otherwise.

Moving onto the rest of the face, I actually started to figure out how to do this. Stretching pieces of fleece over sections of Shannon's face, I used stick pins to attach the cloth and decide where it needed to be folded or cut. When I had finalized an area to cover, I would unpin a section of the cloth and glue it down, a bit at a time. Then I returned the pins, until the piece had dried thoroughly.

One thing I learned right away was that I needed to apply the cement only to the foam mask, and not to the cloth. And don't allow more than a thin coating on the foam! This was an inexpensive, medium-weight fleece and the glue soaked into it right way.

Stitching the seams gave me a final opportunity to refine the shapes, adding tension with each stitch.

Since her bouffant was so smooth, covering Shannon's hairdo with brown fleece was one of the easiest parts of the build. However, it was just a chocolatey smooth expanse with almost no variation! You can tell (from context) that it's a bouffant, but I really wanted to give it a better finish.

Probably the best tool for that job would be an airbrush, which is not part of my collection. But even a rural hick like me has access to spraypaint!

I taped off some sections to mask them, and brought in three colors of spraypaint: a lighter brown, a black, and a bright yellow for highlighting.

The real trick here was that I needed a tighter stream on the paint can. You can buy stencils that clip onto the side of the can, blocking the stream except for a single, small opening. These stencils also have a reservoir inside to collect all that excess paint, which is probably a nice feature.

But I wanted to do it now, and I don't think I can get those stencils locally, which is not a nice feature. However, I have another thing that attaches to a spraypaint can, and that's a spraypaint lid. I used my Dremel to cut a large opening in the back of the lid (you can see it in the picture) to allow me to reach the nozzle, and used a hand drill to make a small opening right in the front.

This thing is hugely messy, but it works. The lid stencil effectively strangles the stream of paint, giving me a tight line and much greater control. But that lid fills up with paint really fast and holy cow you really better be doing this outside!

Wear gloves. Dump excess paint frequently. Be sure that you are not holding the can above anything, any part of your project, that is not safely covered!

I used the same stencil (and horrifyingly messy technique) to add royal blue lowlights on the turquoise fleece.

I gave Shannon some lids and lashes, cutting the lashes from felt and sandwiching them between pieces of turquoise fleece. At this time I lined the whole interior of the mask with black felt, which allowed me to sew the fleece through the eye openings into the felt. Then I could glue the lids at the top, and stitch them in at the back to make the whole thing very secure.

A coat of gesso on the lips creates a workable surface, although it remains a little bumpy since the fleece is, you know, fleece. But it's fine, because I can paint on it. I gave her some real nice pink lipstick, just like the earlier version, because it will look great with her outfit.

This was where I used turquoise and white paints to a little bit of work on Shannon's face. I gave a more defined shape to her nose, for one. But I also added a smattering a small blemishes here and there, just little round spots (singly or in wee clusters) like freckles or moles or something.

On one hand, the blemishes help break up the monotony, create a sense of detail, gently suppress the viewer's awareness of the seams be overlapping them. And on the other hand, in practical terms, they let me cover up the worst of the glue stains, where the cement had soaked through the fleece.

My only regret in the redesign of the Shannon mask is that the paper mache version had those sweet chicken-drumstick-shaped earrings, which I thought were such a great character detail. The new foam mask did not really allow a dangly earring, it just didn't work with the space between her cheeks and earlobes. It was a tragic loss.

This is no substitute, but I decided that I could at least allow the new Shannon to have a flower in her hair. It would help break up the rather significant surface area of her bouffant, and also (most importantly) make us feel pretty.

I stopped by the local second hand shop and was thrilled to find, in their small craft area, a pink fleece remnant that was more or less exactly what I needed! I had not intended to use fleece, but since it was the same weight and texture as the material I'd used to wrap the mask, it seemed like too good an opportunity to waste! Certainly it was worth three bucks, and I can make a dog toy out of the rest.

The new Shannon is amazing. Several inches taller than the first one, but something like three pounds lighter. Granted, she wasn't built for practicality, and it took some practice to figure out how to move around in her safely. Visibility is quite limited! But dude, come on. Look at her. She's gigantic and beautiful and you all wish you could be her.

Worn with the same costume, this even-bigger mask somehow works just as well, and it was a privilege to take her out on the town. I'm more confident now that I can do what needs to be done for the mannequins in my future show, and in the meantime, I get to figure out how to store a mask the size of a planet!