Glazed Hampire Mask

The town where I live hosts a regional art show every winter, and by the summer of 2023 I had decided I would enter the show with a new collection of masks called Edible Horrors. Anybody who participates in the show can submit up to three pieces for consideration, and I obviously intended to submit the statutory maximum.

I had begun this series with the Cookie Monster mask, and followed that with the Cakenstein. Both of them took their shapes from specific movie monsters, and they were both desserts, so for the third mask I wanted to go in a different direction.

The Glazed Hampire was not based on Dracula, or Count Orlock, or even Jerry Dandridge; it was just an ordinary vampire, of no particular pedigree. And it would be a savory accompaniment to an offering that might, otherwise, be considered overly sweet.

Mannequin head, craft blades, corrugated cardboard, masking tape, duct tape, paper mache clay, flour paste, clay carving tools, acrylic paint and varnish

Armed with a vague idea, I was ready to make a mask! I wasn't prepared to define the vampire part of hampire yet, but I felt pretty comfortable with the ham part. I started building a great big ham shank out of cardboard.

I constructed the ham around a mannequin head, which made it easy to get the size right, and I could tape pieces of the building materials to the face whenever I needed to.

Once it was built, I covered it with the first layer of paper mâché. I knew that I would have to make some adjustments later (particularly on the back, so it would look less like I had a muffler on my head) but it was a good start.

Far more interesting than reshaping the back, though, was the challenge of figuring out the face. While I was building the ham shank, I had been contemplating this next bit. My hope was that, using the natural flexibility of sliced ham, I could successfully create the illusion of a vampire face that was literally shaped out of the ham itself.

To start, the mouth would have a flare to the upper lip, so that a set of hammy fangs could be built behind it. I tried various configurations, and numbers of teeth, but in the end I loved the simplicity of just two fangs on the top, all by themselves. And not too close together like Nosferatu. 

The facial expression would be governed by the Hampire's furrowed brow, which I would accomplish by creating two partial slices of ham curling down over the eyes. I didn't know if this was going to work at all, but I had a pretty clear image in my head and I had to give it a shot.

At this point, the whole mask looked a bit too much like those silly, fish-like dream demons from the 3D sequence in Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, but I was confident that the paint job would take care of any lingering fishiness once I got to that stage.

The second coat of paper mache included some extensive clay work on the face, because the ham slices needed to be very carefully shaped and smoothed. Those tunnels below the slices were going to be a nightmare (a Final Nightmare?) to paint, but what choice did I have?

At this stage I also attached the eye rings, which needed to be behind the hambrows. Eventually they would become pineapple rings, but that was still a way off.

To turn it from a muffler into a ham, I needed to cover the mask with delicious crackly skin. Since I wanted a traditional scored surface, I drew in all the slash lines with a permanent marker, and began attaching quadrilaterals of clay to the outside.

For each piece, I rolled out some paper mache clay and placed it directly on the mask. Then I cut away the excess with a clay tool, and stuck the clay to the mask using flour paste. I think part of me was hoping that, when I did this, it would look enough like a ham that I could avoid the obvious necessity of reshaping the back of the mask.

I could not avoid that obvious necessity. So I stalked around the mask a few times and made my decision, marked it off like cruel and heartless cosmetic surgeon, then sawed away the offending portion.

Using duct tape as a ratchet and a binder, I bent the underside into a new position, then did a whole new layer of paper mache.

Once the paper mâché was dry, I repeated the scored-skin process over the new section. It looked way better now. And more delicious.

With the butt end of the ham mostly in shape, it was time to finish the bone. I cut it down to the length I wanted, and built up a plausibly asymmetrical bone mass around it. A small ridge of paper clay around the circumference of the bone made it look like the meat had pulled away while it cooked.

Here I began to apply the next layer of skin to the mask. I looked at lots of photos of finished hams, to internalize the way the skin separated and shrank during the cooking process. Much of the illusion would be accomplished with paint later on, but I needed at least two layers of skin on the mask to provide the proper dimensions.

This is also where I started to refine the boundary where the rind borders the face, building up the low wall of skin to make it clearer, differentiating it from the ham itself.

The last significant undertaking before the paintjob was to make the pineapple rings for the eyes. That was just a matter of adding small clay details to the base shapes that already existed.

On a project like this one, it is impossible to overstate the importance of the paint job, and being patient as the details develop. This was no simple matter of finding the right color; ham, especially an oven-baked glazed ham, is a complicated organic assembly. The color that your eye perceives is a combination of millions of micro-impressions from all the different colors and shapes.

I painted this mask a lot. Adding so many layers of colors. Highlights. Lowlights. Stuff that I hated and then painted out again. Stuff that you can't even see in photos but it looks better in person! At one point, I thought it made sense to add some painted highlights. That took a while to undo.

The process of varnishing this mask was essentially like glazing an actual ham! Because the glaze that goes on a ham is not colorless, I would add acrylic paint to a small serving of glaze in order to tint it. Then I would baste the entire mask with this tinted glaze, and wait.

I repeated this whole procedure numerous times, with different tints in the glaze. Reds, golds, browns. Photos only capture a single moment, but there are actually many layers to this varnish that you really only perceive when either you – or the object – are in motion.

I took a similar approach to the pineapple rings, giving them a layered and syrupy appearance. For the meat, I used a far less reflective varnish, but added some real shine to the veins of fat running through it.

The Glazed Hampire is exactly what I hoped it would be, so I'm entirely to blame for whatever hungry and/or terrified feelings you might be experiencing right now. But remember, in all aspects of life, if something scares you... eat it. Eat it all.