Halloween Costume Hat From Recycled Materials, Lazslos Witch Skin Hat, What We Do in the Shadows, Cardboard and Paint

The dying bavarian witch burner said "Take my hat, its's cuu....." and I thought "It is cool". This rendition made almost entirely of hot glue and cardboard doesn't seem to carry on the curse. But it is light and comfortable for extended wear. The acrylic paint gives it some extra stiffness and water resistance, but the alternating directions of cardboard add a lot of strength. The whole hat weighs only about 14 ounces sized for a mens XL and is very durable when handled with care.

Cardboard, in this case a large shipping box, it is helpful to be able to cut your brim from one large piece, but beyond that smaller pieces are OK. If there are any creases or seams in the box, you may have to camouflage those if they don't play into your design.

Hot glue makes the whole thing work, I find that a high temp glue gun and name brand high temp glue (I like superbonder) makes a big difference. A dual temp gun is nice as well, you can switch it up if you want the glue runnier and switch it back down when it is getting too hot. I probably switch it on a 10-20 min cycle to keep the glue where I like it.

I used Foil tape for the metallic accent, aluminum foil crinkled and smoothed and glued on could work just as well.

Craft foam worked well to cut the "suture" shapes, cardboard would have worked as well or cereal boxes so that it wouldn't have edge texture like the corrugated cardboard. but the black color all throughout saved me some time painting the sutures and the flexibility was nice as well.

I used heavy duty scissors, and a utility knife for most of the work when I wasn't just tearing it by hand.

The painting stage is very flexible. I used what I had, Acrylic paints of various types and 3 or four sizes of brush from a small detail brush to a large stiff 1 inch round brush for blending.

It is good to be able to reference a hat that fits you for the measurements, or you can take the measurements from your head.

If your cardboard has printing on one side, you can make efforts to have that hidden/on the inside so you don't have to worry about it showing through the paint.

I started by cutting out the brim, with the hole slightly oversize since I knew there would be material wrapped into the edge making the hole smaller. This worked out well because I could try it on as I went and decide if I wanted to put more of less material on the inside until I was happy with the fit. I also left tabs protruding into the hole in the brim, so that I could fold them up and have something to anchor to when building the body of the hat off of the brim.

The body of the hat and covering of the brim is just cardboard that I folded and crumpled until it was pliable and shapable, overlapping pieces and gluing with hot glue until I had the form I wanted. Paying attention to the seams and joints now makes it easier in painting to accentuate them instead of trying to hide anything.

A good tip is that where you don't need the strength, you can peel off the backing of the cardboard to reduce bulk and thickness. also trimming pieces to have minimal overlap on the inside when you can keeps it strong without unnecessary material being included.

After completing the hat out of cardboard, and the feathers and brooch separately, I painted everything.

I painted the hat with a coat of gesso lightly tinted to flesh tone (gesso not needed, white paint tinted to flesh would be great as well), then went over the seams with a redder tone and blended it it, and then an even redder tone more localized to the seams. I blended in a darker brownish color on the edges of the skin pieces, without covering all of my red, and then I used lighter colors again to make the centers of the skin pieces come forward again.

After gluing on the sutures and painting them, I clear coated the whole hat with a matte spray before coming back to add the blood and drips with an enamel model paint that should stay very shiny. There are some spare flecks of paint as a result of detailing the sutures in place, but with the overall look, they don't detract and trying to paint the suture pieces when they were loose would have been much fiddlier.

After painting the feathers an brooch, I attached them with hot glue as well.

Thank you for reading, I hope that some part may have been informative or inspirational. This project really surprised me what I could make with only cardboard and I was excited to share. Next time I will take more in progress pictures!

Please ask any questions if you have them and I will do my best to elaborate on the process.