Frosted Circus Elephant Man

Conflict! What do you do when Halloween is the most important day of the year, but you have a show opening on the first of November? When you normally spend three months crafting a costume, but this year you've got canvases to paint? The way I figured it, there were three options.

Option one: skip Halloween. I mean, it's crazy, but it's an option. I could focus on producing work for the show, watch scary movies, and promise to make a costume next year that's twice as amazing.

Option two: Costume redux. I've made a lot of costumes, and I still have most of them! In fact, some of them are pretty freaking great, and there would be nothing wrong with wearing one of them again. They actually deserve to be seen, and strut their stuff on the streets. Costumes are people too!

Option three: half-ass it! Last summer, I had a show at the local Art Center, showcasing a bunch of masks I'd made. What I'm saying is, I have a lot of masks, most of which are not part of Halloween costumes. So I could select one of those masks, and then cobble together some sort of outfit to go with it.

I chose option three, and then I did a pretty half-assed job of documenting it. Now, ladies and gentlemen, without further ado: this is how I half-ass Halloween!

The mask I chose was the one I call Delicious Elephant. In case you were literally born yesterday, let me explain: there are cookies you can buy that are in the shapes of 'circus animals' like elephants and giraffes and lions. They're coated in either pink or white frosting, then decorated with multicolored sugar sprinkles. They are wonderful, and then after a while they might be awful, but eventually they will be wonderful again!

When I made the mask (which was nearly two years ago now), I built it out of newspaper and cardboard, directly onto a mannequin head. This technique has served me well for a number of projects; when I'm satisfied with the shape, I cover it with paper mache and then pop it off the form to make refinements.

The most interesting part was the actual design. I knew that the intent behind the mask would be instantly recognizable, once the paint job was finalized, but the challenge came in adapting the cookie concept into a three-dimensional mask. Mother's is the premiere brand of frosted circus animal cookies, but even the knockoffs share the same basic traits: two colors of frosting, colorful sprinkles, and various animal shapes in profile.

So the first question I had to answer in designing the mask was which animal to use, one that will be distinctive as just a head. Then, I needed to figure out how to make it into a front-facing mask, while preserving the simplicity of the frosted cookie designs.

The elephant felt like the best option for an unmistakable animal. Giraffes are just too vague without their necks, and don't even get me started on camels! So I made an elephant, and I curved its trunk upward to make sure that people could glimpse the unfrosted cookie underneath.

I made the sugar crystals out of paper mache clay, and made the mask wearable with a pair of ribbon ties. They were built with a cluster of sugar crystals at one end, so they don't spoil the illusion.

But all of this is ancient history, since I'm half-assing Halloween and this mask is two years old.

Normally, I put way too much thought into the characters I create for Halloween, imbuing them with complex backstories and even employing strict logic to my costume choices. But half-assing Halloween means that I intended to put together an outfit, not a costume. I would just make it look like a costume with a few carefully-crafted accessories.

The first accessory was the vest.

I had seen a pink polo shirt at a local second hand store, so when I decided to wear the Delicious Elephant, I returned for the polo shirt and also picked up a black suit vest.

First I disassembled the polo shirt, and popped the buttons off the vest. Then it was a simple matter of tracing a pattern onto the pink fabric, cutting it out, and wrapping the black vest.

With the polo shirt as a base, I painted the vest using the same mixture as the mask.

Everything I did for this costume was easy, but this part was pretty tedious. I needed sugar crystals, and I didn't want to rely on glue to attach them. So I made them individually, with paper clay, and embedded a loop of craft wire into each one.

The loop of wire was a handy way to hold them while I painted them, but that's not the actual reason for it. I used the wire as a way to sew the beads of sugar onto the vest.

The gloves are just a pair of cheap, bottom-of-the-line work gloves from the hardware store. These are great because they're plain canvas, and perfect for painting. They were easy to transform into an accessory for the mask, with cookie-brown on the palms and pink frosting everywhere else.

I do enjoy a costume that completely covers my human parts, so I had decided early on to wear a balaclava with the mask. ('Balaclava' is just another word for something like a ski mask, but I'm going to be using the word 'mask' a lot.) By carefully threading the ribbon ties through the eye opening before putting on the mask, I can even hide the ribbons underneath the balaclava for a cleaner look.

At first, I thought I was going to wear a pink one. Boy, was I wrong!

I really liked the effect of wearing the mask with a balaclava, but it also looked a little strange in profile because the mask is actually pretty flat. I felt like it needed a little something extra, to break up the silhouette of my head.

With a black balaclava, the pink mask sort of floats in front of it. I wanted an accessory that would float along with that.

I cut a cardboard flap off of a shipping box and built it into a tiny little bowler hat. I covered it with paper mache and made sugar crystals on it, the same as the mask.

Along the inside rim, I embedded some wire loops, which could be used to anchor it to the balaclava.

The paint job went the same as all the others. I was becoming an old hand at this cookie business! A toasty cookie-brown beneath the brim, bold pink on top, and assorted multicolored sugar crystals.

All of the clothing accessories for this costume were purchased at that local second-hand store, where everything costs one dollar. Most of that was pretty straightforward: the polo shirt and vest, and a pair of plain black pants that were slightly too short (to show off my socks!)

But I also bought a coat, because it was a neat old wool coat with a funny shape. The shoulders had a billowiness to them that I liked.

I did think it would be better if I could find a way to slightly tie the coat into the cookie motif, though, so I cut off all the buttons and replaced them with cookie fragments.

The fragments were made from paper mache clay, which I had rolled and cut like dough. After adding the sugar crystals, I put three holes into each one, for sewing.

They were all given the full paint job; the bottoms of the buttons are cookie-brown, even though nobody is ever going to see them! That might not sound like half-assing to you, but riddle me this: do you see any pictures of those cookie buttons being made? No?

Somebody using their whole ass would have taken pictures.

We hit the town in our half-ass costumes to great acclaim. In particular, Bill, wearing another mask that I had made two years ago, was a smashing success! He wore my red skinny jeans, with a red union suit, a long grey wig, and my stop sign mask. And they loved him!

At first I was bummed out that we weren't going to do anything very elaborate this year, but for a more minimalist approach it all worked out very nicely. The costume lends itself to both playful and sinister interpretations. It's both immediately recognizable, and puzzling. This is a fun line to walk, and a fun costume to wear, so I guess it's okay that just this once we decided to half-ass Halloween!