Shannon Mask

Nothing represents rural Oregon like a sasquatch, am I right? I wanted to pay tribute to one of our most famous residents with a mask that would do justice to its subject's robust nature.

She was going to be gigantic.

Of course a sasquatch mask needed to be gigantic; that much was obvious. What was perhaps less obvious was that her name was Shannon, her skin was blue, and she was a waitress at the local truck stop. All of these facts were clear to me at the outset, because as an Oregonian I have a natural psychic attunement with the fundamental truths of all sasquatches. Even imaginary ones that I haven't built yet.

My basic approach for oversized masks is to build the main structure out of cardboard and tape. Many people would use chicken wire, which is fine if you have that sort of thing. But I work on the cheap and I usually have a lot of boxes laying around, so that's what I use.

I planned to build Shannon with a broad, flared neck forming a stable base, a dramatically large face area to maintain proportion with the neck, and most importantly, a towering beehive hairdo because she is a gorgeous, glamorous monster.

I started by building a wide flange at the base, to sit on my shoulders and dip low on the chest. I knew that once the face was made, there would be a concentration of weight at the front of the mask, and a low-hanging flange would brace against the chest to keep it stable.

From there I built the structure upward, using duct tape (and the tensile strength of the cardboard) to force the flange to maintain its curved bottom shape.

During this first pass, I clearly defined where the jawline would go, but left the face as a large open area until I had built the whole scaffolding. When it came time to figure out the face blocking, I put the mask on and marked out where my eyeline needed to be, and taped a large strip of cardboard above that eyeline, and another one below. These would form the anchors for building Shannon's actual face.

In my time as a cartoonist, I've had occasion to draw sasquatches once in a while, and I have a certain preferred look. My sasquatches have big round muzzles, receding eyes, and extremely heavy brows, and I wanted to realize that in three dimensions. From the cardboard strip above the eyeline, I started building her brow, and from the strip below the eyeline, I used more cardboard to sculpt a bold, jutting muzzle. Then I used cardboard and masking tape to seal off the entire structure and applied a layer of paper mache over the whole thing. Now I had a full base to work on!

With the base completed, I was now able to break out the paper clay and start to sketch in the details of Shannon's face, joining the browline to her cheeks, establishing a nose and chin, and starting to find the expression of her mouth.

Also, since Shannon's hair would be worn in an updo, she was going to need a set of visible ears, which I built from twisted newspaper and masking tape. And magnets! That's right, I put magnets in the earlobes, because Shannon likes to wear a little bling at work, and magnets would allow me to make her a set of removeable earrings!

I spent quite a long time working her face, sanding, making little adjustments and fussing over her, but eventually I had to move on because there was a potentially more challenging job on the horizon: the beehive.

I knew that I would be using paper clay to make the details of the hairstyle, but I still didn't know exactly how that was going to work. The first thing I did was go in with a Sharpie and start drawing guidelines to establish her part, and the directional flow of the hairs, the spiral on top. I figured out where her bangs would go and where the spit-curls would lie.

Eventually I had to actually start making it, so I got my clay and just dug in. My general idea was to apply clay directly to the surface, pinching and squeezing and dragging it with my fingers, following the directional lines that I had laid in earlier. I thought that this would form a textured undercarriage for the hairdo, and then finer details could be built on top of that.

The theory was sound, but the execution was even more complicated than I had imagined.

Creating the details was a simple matter of rolling out noodles of clay and blending them into the sculpture, but it takes a lot of them. I spent days circling Shannon's head and identifying areas that needed just one more strand, and I could still be doing that today if I didn't make myself stop. The bangs alone are an insane tangle of paper mache clay that can't be dusted without Q-Tips!

I wanted Shannon's neck and throat to be shaggy, so I began to apply dozens and dozens of little squiggles of clay to the area. At this stage they looked a bit...symbolic, more than actual hair, but I had an idea that the paint job would improve the look.

Now that Shannon's exterior was solid, I went inside and started tearing out the cardboard scaffolding. She was going to be a heavy girl, so I removed everything that no longer seemed structurally necessary, and put a new layer of paper mache over the inside.

Shannon is a blue sasquatch with brunette hair, but to get a rich depth of color, I started by painting her entire surface with delicious chocolatey brown.

There was a clear vision in my head of how the blue and brown colors interacted on the mask, but it was an ongoing process to actually achieve it. Her entire face – muzzle, brows, ears, chin – were a bold bright blue, but the lowlights of those areas were the same brown as her fur. Finding the right levels required multiple applications of both colors, until the transition was pretty subtle and almost powdery in places.

The blue rapidly darkened to brown at the edges of these blue spaces – under the chin, behind the ears, the nape of the neck – as we get into the areas of excessive sasquatch hair growth. However, I made sure that there was still significant blue tint as well, to distinguish the merely furry areas from her behive hairdo.

The beehive was the only part of Shannon that remained the chocolatey brown of the base coat, although I did add several decorative streaks of blue even here.

The only deviations from the color scheme are Shannon's makeup. She wears blue eyeshadow, but it's a different blue from her skin tone. More dramatically, Shannon sports baby-pink lipstick with pearly finish!

Her earrings are glittery golden chicken drumsticks, formed from twisted newspaper and masking tape. They were papered and painted just like the rest of her, but then given the fancy additional coating of gold glitter Mod Podge. To make the stones, I blooped a blob of hot glue over a black bead and let it dry. Then I painted a spiral on it, and blooped another blob of hot glue. Presto! Gaudy stones for costume jewelry for sasquatches!

I wrote a rather detailed apology in this space, because when I was writing this Instructable I discovered that I didn't have a single picture of Shannon's false eyelashes being made. I talked about how, when I'm sculpting and smearing and my hands are wet, I do sometimes miss photographing an important bit here and there, but it's rare for me to entirely fail to document a step. I even copped to the fact that, earlier in this same Instructable, I tried to squeak by the fact that I hadn't taken any pictures of the ears before I attached them to Shannon's head!

This seemed especially strange though, because I could have sworn that I actually remembered taking progress pictures of the eyelashes, but all the evidence seemed to contradict that assertion. So I wrote the apology, and then I did my best to describe the process anyway. But then, just now, I found this one single photo, tucked away in an accidental folder in Google Drive, and if nothing else it proves that my memory is not entirely faulty.

So, without further ado:

Shannon wears false eyelashes when she's working, and they had to be made separately and applied near the end. Because of her brow shape, it would have been almost impossible to effectively paint either her face or the lashes themselves, if they had been affixed earlier.

I rolled paper clay into a thin sheet, and attached that sheet to a piece of newspaper using a thin coat of flour paste. I cut twelve individual strips, and curled them at the ends as they dried. When they were set, I joined them in groups of six using paper clay.

The false lashes were a straightforward accessory. They were never intended to be identical and were meant to look phony, so I let them dry according to their own whims. I painted them all black and shiny while I was still working on Shannon's paint job. When it was time to deploy the eyelashes, I joined them directly to the painted surface with paper clay, then repainted the affected area after it had dried.

So that's Shannon, the big blue sasquatch, queen of the truck stop breakfast shift! She has just the one pair of earrings so far, but I'm keen to give her a set of dangling, shiny T-bone steaks in the near future.

My grandmother was a waitress for much of my youth, which took place in the late seventies and early eighties. I have a memory of her in a waitress uniform of the period, and I think Shannon would do well in such a frock. If I could get my hands on a chubby-suit, and a diner uniform that fits over it, I'm eager to take her out on the town!