Hot Rod Carved Foam Dog Mask

The character of Hot Rod - an alien race-car driving dog from another dimension - was created for my Halloween costume seven years ago. The original version of that costume was pretty awesome, and I had longed for an excuse to be Hot Rod again.

Well, now I have an art show scheduled for 2027, and one of the things that I want to display in that show is my Hot Rod costume (because Hot Rod also features prominently in several paintings). I bought a mannequin to display him on, and then promptly knocked the head off and broke the original mask.

Of course, breaking the mask was devastating. But it reinforced (or maybe just forced) my other idea, which was to make a new, more dramatic mask out of carved foam, which would be much lighter and easier to display on a mannequin.

So this year, I focused my Halloween efforts on reinventing Hot Rod as a carved foam head - and of course I made a few upgrades to the rest of the costume, along the way.

The main ingredients for the project are a polystyrene block, and a couple of yards of fleece (red and white, in this case). I used significant amounts of glue. I carved the foam with a hot knife and the pictured hook blade, and sanded with coarse sandpaper. Also paper clay if you have it, thread, curved needles, and a hundred thousand straight pins.

The most important thing I would need, if I wanted to carve a dog mask out of foam, was a big foam block to carve it out of.

My first and only experience with foam carving was last Halloween, when I remade my sasquatch waitress mask out of polyethylene foam. It wasn't easy, but I had figured a lot of stuff out along the way, and hoped to go the same route again. Unfortunately, my source for PE foam never materialized, and I had to improvise.

What I ended up doing was to buy a single sheet of foam insulation board. They are available in various thicknesses (mine was two inches thick) and the standard size is four by eight feet. Of course, it's not polyethylene, it's polystyrene – but it's extremely lightweight and that's what I was aiming for.

The plan, to the extent that I had one, was to cut some big rectangles out of that foam board, then glue those rectangles together in a stack. Presto! Foam block.

I wanted my mask to be big, so I started by cutting out six rectangles that were 12 by 18 inches. The insulation board was easy to cut with the same hot knife that I had used on the sasquatch, although the material behaved very differently. It would melt at a much lower temperature, necessitating a lower setting, and I quickly learned that I needed to try cutting all the way across the board in a single motion. Even a brief pause would raise the temperature too much, melting the foam and creating pits or hard edges.

Now, in principle, everything was working fine. I cut out my rectangles, and they were a tad irregular but they were good enough.

There was one problem, though. And that problem is that sometimes I am a big dummy.

I was all eager to get started, so I just did... when what I should have done was take two seconds to think about the fact that polystyrene and polyethylene are not the same.

But I didn't. I just went right on ahead and glued those rectangles together, using the same Barge cement that I had used last year.

I'm sure someone out there just gasped when they read that, shocked that anyone could be such a dope as to apply Barge cement to polystyrene! But I did, ladies and gentlemen. I applied it to all those surfaces and pressed those rectangles together.

And I left them there to die.

Because that's what they did, my poor little rectangles. They died a tragic, David Cronenberg-style death, their surfaces twisted and warped into a hideous caricature of the straight(ish)-sided rectangles they once had been.

The block was unusable.

So, having learned a hard lesson, I started over again. Only about a third of the insulation board had been utilized in my first misadventure, so I cut out six new rectangles. But this time, I actually did some testing first!

With a piece of scrap foam, I marked out three areas and applied Mod Podge, a clear Gorilla Glue, and a a white Loctite glue. All three of those were adhesives that I already had in my studio, and which I knew that I could acquire locally if I needed more.

Turns out, any one of those three glues would have been a much better choice than the Barge cement, so I made my second foam block using the Loctite. Because that's what I had the most of.

Okay, so I made the foam block again, in exactly the same way, except I didn't wreck it this time.

Carving out the dog head from the foam block was a real challenge, even though I was going for a simple design. The foam board is frequently uncooperative. It seems to have a 'grain,' in the sense that any portion of the board resists being cut in more than one direction, but that grain varies wildly. Two pieces of foam, cut from the same section side by side, are not necessarily going to have the same grain. And if you cut or sand against the grain, the foam is likely to pit and tear, creating extremely irregular surfaces.

Working on a block, which is itself made from six separate pieces of foam glued together in a stack, requires constantly assessing and readjusting your direction of approach. Getting the big shape of the head wasn't that hard, but eventually I realized I was going to have to make the whole eye area separately – so I could carve it from a single hunk of foam, instead of trying to coax it out of the layers.

I knew that I would be able to use paper mache clay to smooth off some problem areas, or fill little pits, but filling the gaps around the eye mask was going to be too much. I decided to try using some of that expanding foam, and remembering the fiasco with the Barge cement, I tested it on a scrap of polystyrene first.

The Loctite expanding foam that I picked up for my experiment did not corrode the polystyrene. In fact, it bonded successfully, and dried to a consistency that could be cut with a knife or sanded. All the things I needed from it! So I used the spray foam to attach the eye mask and fill the gaps, then cut it down and shaped it with sandpaper

After finessing it with some paper clay and adding raised brow shapes, the whole thing was starting to almost look like something!

At this point, it was time to start putting a layer of white fleece on the head, using the same basic technique I had learned last Halloween. First: wear gloves! Then I attached the fleece where I wanted it using straight pins, and glued it down in sections, using the pins along the edge to hold tension. In this instance, I painted on the Gorilla glue using a cheap brush (I bought a bundle of them for 35 cents each, and just threw them away when they were hopelessly gunked up). Anywhere that I needed the fleece to hold a difficult contour, I reinforced the glue with pins until it had completely dried.

Rather than create complicated patterns, I just folded the fleece as needed. These folds are never going to be invisible (particularly on the snout, where they are needed to create a rounded appearance), but if you keep them roughly symmetrical it looks okay. I also sew them down using a curved needle, which gives them a much more finished appearance than glue alone.

I also needed to figure out where the red fleece was going to go, around the eyes and to the back of his head. The red needed to surround the eyes, but also cover the whole area that the ears would eventually occupy, and everything in between.

This process was actually pretty easy, since they don't need to be even, but finishing off the joins was a lot more difficult. You can't use white thread, or red thread. It would show. The only solution was to use invisible thread, and if you've never had to use that stuff, consider yourself lucky!

Invisible thread does a great job. It's perfect. But it's monstrous to work with, a huge pain to tie off, to thread the needle, to even see what you're doing! I hate it. But it's great.

The nose was a super basic accessory, just sanded down from a rounded triangle of foam. Like a cartoon, not the actual shape of a dog's nose. I covered it with fleece, ensuring a seam ran down the center line.

I wanted to have the nose around, so I could see how things were looking, but I did not attach it for quite a while. It was easy enough to stick it on with corsage pins, and then remove it when I was working on the mask.

Similarly, I wanted to have a floppy tongue as a visual cue, but I wasn't ready to finish it off yet. So I made a tongue from a scrap of pink fleece in my remnant drawer. Just two pieces of fleece, with a narrow strip down the center of one side (that way I could stitch a visible line down the middle of the tongue).

The ears would be, perhaps, the most important piece of this puzzle.

The ears would be perched over those back corners of the skull, the part of the mask that still looked the most like a carved block. Those ears would disguise the corners, turning the whole thing into a more organic shape. And adding character!

My initial plan was to approach the ears like everything else, carving them out of foam and then covering them with fleece, but that did bring up some issues. First, in order to achieve a snug fit, the foam would have to be carved out to perfectly straddle the intended area of the mask – not impossible, but certainly an exercise in frustration. Second, they would be necessarily rigid (not the best visual quality for a dog's ear). Third, they would be complicated shapes to cover in fleece, and hand-stitching the inside of an ear is not a fun time.

So why was I thinking about carving them from foam, anyway? When I had all this fleece?

Instead, I decided to make a trial ear, completely out of cloth.

First, I drew out the ear shape on paper so I'd have a pattern to match, then I cut the ear out of some leftover brown fleece. I also cut a similar shape out of quilt batting, to give it some thickness and structure.

My thought was that the two layers of fleece could be pulled apart at the base, in order to map out the proper 'footprint' for the ear on the top of the mask. The quilt batting would make it stable up top, and I would stuff just a little bit of pillow stuffing into the opening at the bottom (where the ear is thickest).

Pinning my trial ear to the mask, it sure looked like this idea was going to work! I would need to make a separate piece for the little front flap of the ears (the helix, maybe?) but otherwise, it basically sold the illusion.

Satisfied with my plan, I went ahead and started cutting out fleece ears. Two red pieces for each side, and a big white one to make the inner ear area. Again, the nice thing about organic shapes is that they can be similar but they don't have to be symmetrical!

Another cool thing about using fleece for the ears is that it was easy to keep adjusting the footprint with straight pins. Every time you move the base of the ear a little bit, it changes the way the ear rests. Maybe it stands a little taller, maybe it gets a little flappier! I played around with each ear until I was happy with how they looked from each side, before I started sewing them down.

Once everything was sewn down all over the mask, it was finally time to permanently attach the ol' schnozz. I used Gorilla glue and then wrapped it tight with an Ace bandage to keep constant pressure on overnight.

The final effect was all done with paint. Well, first a layer of gesso on the area I wanted to paint, because fleece is fuzzy and doesn't lend itself naturally to painting with a brush. But then it was just a matter of doing a few layers of development with the bright yellow, and a bit of contouring with black and red. I kept it very simple, just enough to do the job and no more!

There was just a little bit of other paint involved, and again, this was probably not essential but it made me feel a lot better about the project. I used a light wash of black acrylic to stain the area under the snout, to give a little greater depth. I also added the sagging lip at the back, and contoured the tongue.

The full racing suit was made for the original version of this costume, and I highly recommend checking out that Instructable just to get an idea of those details. Because now they're about to change!

I got some yellow rhinestones to decorate the flame motif on my racing suit, because it just felt like he needed seventeen pieces of flair. I also cut another three inches off the legs and hemmed them up again, because I always wanted them to be highwaters but they didn't seem quite high enough!

During the past seven years, the white belt I'd made for the original costume had got a little yucky (there was sticky-back velcro involved, which had kind of... melted). I found an old yellow raincoat at a thrift store and used that to make a new belt, keeping the white 'buckle' and holster that I made last time.

And I bejeweled the buckle, because why the heck not?

And I used the same raincoat to make a new dog collar, because it should match the belt, right?

And then sometime after dark on October 30, I decided that I needed to have dog toes on my shoes. There's still plenty of time for that, isn't there?

Quickly, I traced shapes onto the foam using my actual shoes as a stencil, and carved out a paw that could be glued to the rubber bit on the toe of the shoe (they are knockoff Chucks with that rubbery toe cap). I stuffed the shoes with towels to keep them open, then glued the foam shapes to the toes, taping them down and letting them dry overnight.

On the day before Halloween, I covered those toes with fleece, put a felt cover on the bottoms, and then added little claws made out of raincoat. I love them!

Since I was working quickly, I helped maintain the tension on the fleece by pulling down around the bottom edge, holding it in place with a pin, and then leaving the pin there. They're buried deep in the foam where they are in no danger of hurting anybody, and their heads are covered by the black felt base.

The lines between the toes are carved into the foam, but then enhanced with paint. I also took the blunt edge of a scissor and pressed it into each of those grooves, giving them a bit more definition/

Yes, I lost some rhinestones while I was out playing. Yes, people kept calling me "Clifford" because the world lacks imagination.

But you know what? I looked amazing. And my partner looked amazing too, but that's a whole other story!