Tegan Monster Girl Costume

Tegan is the worst little girl in the world. If you just want to see how I made her, please feel free to skip to the next step! Otherwise, stick with me here for all the unnecessary backstory. It's like the part before every recipe on the internet, where the author tells you some blisteringly long, tangentially related tale about their grandmother's childhood in Alsace-Lorraine, but you're just waiting for them to tell you how many eggs you need to make the gosh-darn lemon bars. It's cool. Skip it.

But if you care a little about the 'why' and not just the 'how', here we go!

To understand where this year’s Halloween costume came from, you need to know that in the Spring I began a deep dive into the world of Ultraman. I’ve watched the original 1966 series a bunch of times, and I knew there was a lot more out there, but I had never touched any of it!

(To be honest, that was by design; I'm well aware of the fact that I tend to go hard and deep on anything that pricks my interest, and I was scared that if I allowed myself a peek into the further reaches of Ultraman, I'd go a little crazy. I was correct.)

So I went a little crazy. Ultramantiga. Ultraseven. Ultraman Neos. Ultraman Taro. My brain was marinating it! There was a neverending parade of baffling monsters. Furry ones, scaly ones, insects and reptiles and robots. I loved them all.

So one day I’m watching an episode of Ultraman Max, which introduces the monster called Luganoger. He’s a big space jerk who destroys planets. Like many Ultraman monsters, the costume is insanely elaborate, and nothing like mine. You may rightly be wondering: what does this have to do with anything? Well, it’s this:

Luganoger has masks on his hands.

Masks. On his hands.

Up to then, I had a super vague notion of what Halloween would be. I’d made a sketch of a cyclops girl with pigtails and a crazy smile, but I didn’t know who she was or what she had going on. And then I watched Ultraman Max and I knew: I had to make masks for my hands.

This didn't explain the whole character, of course, but it gave me a direction. She was a horrible, grinning cyclops with something monstrous where her hands should be, and maybe she was terrible enough to battle Ultraman himself!

That was enough to get started.

My partner was feeling poorly on his birthday at the beginning of September, so I sat beside him on the couch and made this mask.

For a giant, over-the-head mask like this one, I tend to be free-form in my approach. I knew more or less what I wanted, but there was not a rigidly defined goal for me to reach. I just started sculpting with cardboard and tape, tugging and tacking until her face appeared.

The upside to this approach is that you can get some interesting and unexpected faces. The downside is that, without a more active approach to the design, you sometimes end up with a mask that is uncomfortable or dangerous to wear! Tegan is not going to be especially uncomfortable, but I will say that she offers a pretty obstructed view when it comes to little tasks like 'seeing where you're going.'

Her most significant structural detail is on the back of her head. Tegan (who had, at this point, no name) was going to need pigtails. And while I love a paper mache mask, I definitely didn't want her pigtails to be solid forms. My intention was to create the pigtails out of cloth (or something?), which could be tightly bound at one end and then shunked through receptive openings on the back of the mask.

(Shunk is a technical term, and if you don't understand it, ask a teacher, clergyman, or other trusted adult.)

I probably should have documented this process more thoroughly, but I promise it's not complicated.

Tegan needed a dress. I knew what style of dress she needed, and a bit of research told me that this style of dress is called a 'pinafore dress'. So I did what I always do, which is look at a lot of pictures and try to figure out the easiest way to make it.

Although I did not have or use a pattern, I was encouraged by the simplicity (but not by the McCall's! Heyo! It's a fabric store joke. It's hilarious). Even with a full skirt instead of the more traditional apron, it was still simple. And fortunately, I had a huge piece of red corduroy covered with tiny golden stars, which I got for one dollar at a second hand store!

I picked where I wanted the waistline to land on my body, measured with flexible tape, and made a waistband for the dress.

The front of the dress was created with a similarly loose philosophy. If the waistband is here, how high up do I want the front to go? Pick a spot, and sew a rectangle of the appropriate size. And to keep things as easy as possible, I made the back rectangle exactly the same size.

When I made this dress, I did it by taking measurements on my own body and writing them down, but if you've got a willing participant it would also be easy to just pin the fabric to an actual person and build the dress that way. As long as you are not super picky about the tailoring, which I wasn't because this is a really basic peasant dress.

For the skirt, I decided the circumference by eyeball. I made the full-sized tube of the skirt, then created the pleats/flare by gathering it into the waistband. First I pinned in the compass points: front center of the waistband, back center, and each side. This gave me four equal, manageable sections to work with, folding the ruffles in by hand and pinning them down very securely. A single running stitch all the way around the waistband holds it all in place.

I made the two shoulder straps and stitched them to the back panel, then put the dress on to decide how long I wanted them to be. I pinned them to the correct length, then cut them down and added velcro to fasten them (the buttons are purely decorative!)

There were a few details added later (like the little ruffles on the shoulder straps, or hemming the skirt up higher once I got my leggings, and three buttons I made out of Fimo) but the basic dress actually came together in about five hours.

The hair was easy but, like many parts of this costume, very time-consuming. Each piece of hair is a tube of cloth. I cut jillions of two- and three-inch wide strips of cloth, and I sewed them back-to-back. And then I turned them right side out. It's easy! But doing it ninety times is maybe a little tedious.

I experimented with different ways of preparing the pigtails to be inserted, but in the end, the best solution was just to wrap it really really tightly with duct tape!

I made a number of refinements to the mask using paper mache clay, but I consciously tried not to be such a big fuss-pot about it.

Here's the thing. I dress up every Halloween, in varying degrees of epic-ness. But I had an art show in 2021 that consisted entirely of masks. So for two years leading up to that, all I did was make masks for the show, and in the years since then, all of my Halloween costumes have been built around masks from the show.

It has been five years since I wore a Halloween costume with a mask that had been made just for that costume. All of those intervening masks had been made specifically to be displayed in an art gallery setting... but I didn't need to be so fancy anymore.

This wasn't meant to be a 'work of art', it was just a mask for me to wear on the holiday and have fun! I won't be entering any contests, or doing anything more than strutting my stuff around town. And so, with that in mind, when it came time to finish the details on her face I tried not to overwork anything. Let her teeth be choppy. Don't blend the forehead wrinkles all the way, or hide all the seams. She's more of a sketch than a portrait, in the end, which is just fine. She is homemade.

So, you might have noticed that the mask is really big. In order to counter-balance the mask and minimize the 'bobble-head' effect, I needed a similarly gigantic pair of shoes. But I don't know any gigantic cobblers, and I am not one myself, so instead I decided to make pretend shoes. They are, in effect, a costume for my shoes. Because I will be dressing my shoes up as larger shoes.

There was a big piece of blue faux leather that I picked up at the thrift store, and I figured that would provide at least a small measure of weather protection if I used it as the sole. So I put my right shoe on it, traced a big outline for the costume shoe, and then mirrored it for the left side.

I made the shoes from super-cheap costume satin, red on the outside and white on the inside, with thick pieces of quilt batting inside to give the shoe some actual structure. If you follow the pictures, you can see my process. There isn't a pattern, really, just that one shape that I repeated several times.

I used both red and white on the toe piece, and added a red strap to each shoe to create a mary-jane effect. The straps are stitched on the inside and attached with velcro to the outside. The shoes were finished by turning the rim of each ankle inward, and stitching it down. I also made a small pillow to fit inside the toe of each piece, which fills them out but doesn't really make them any heavier.

At last we come to the part that got me rolling in the first place: the hand masks!

What I wanted was a set of big monster hands, each with a huge eye, as big as the eye on my monster girl's head! Which, let's be frank, is a pretty big eye.

For each piece, I started with a cardboard tube that was large enough to stick my hand through. At the end of the tube, I used strips of corrugated cardboard to make the shape of the monster eye. Then I built the hand around the eye, and covered the structure with plaster gauze. I'll still use paper mache later, but I wanted to reinforce the hands with plaster because I was afraid that I might whang them against something!

Whang is a technical term and if you don't understand it, ask a teacher, clergyman, or other trusted adult.

After a significant amount of clay reinforcement, followed by paper mache, the hands wound up looking pretty swell. With a final round of paper mache clay, they got some gnarly eyelids. And then I made myself stop! Yeah, there is not a smooth bit anywhere. There are puckers and buckles in the surface and an appalling lack of realistic detail. And so what? Who's going to care besides me?

Inside each hand, I put a cardboard handle that I duct taped into place. That way I can just comfortably hold them, and move around easily.

I mixed up a big batch of a skin tone that would be enough for the face and the hands, then got to work on a pretty basic paint job. I had incorporated additional eye openings into the monster eye design already, so I had an idea of what that needed to look like.

She was mostly a redhead, but I also painted in a few strands that resembled specific fabric patterns I'd used in the pigtails. It's a simple detail, but it really does aid in selling the illusion!

Next up, painting the hands to look like they belonged with the mask. The most important thing here, of course, is just to make sure that all three eyes match. That's what people are going to notice the most!

When I was satisfied, I covered the wrist areas with fabric. One end is hemmed off, and glued down at the base of the hand. The other end just doubles over and gets tucked down inside opening.

I had ordered a blouse and a pair of leggings to wear under the dress, and both of them had black and white stripes. Since I already had some black and white chevron fabric, I used that on the stumps of my monster hands, which helps them blend into my sleeves.

I had originally made a pair of white satin ankle wraps, but I ended up sewing those to the ankles of the shoes. This basically creates a full shoe-and-sock illusion, which works just fine for me.

Finally, I made a stuffed cloth 'buckle' for each of the mary janes, out of the same fabric I'd used for the dress pockets.

Wearing the mask presents a few challenges. I need to wear a black balaclava to keep my own dumb face from being visible. And I needed to put a little pillow on the roof of the Tegan mask to lift it up a bit higher (she looks like she's hunching her shoulders otherwise). That's all good, but cloth-against-cloth can be a little slick, and I don't really want her to be sliding around a whole lot. Mainly because it ain't easy to reach up and adjust the mask that you're wearing, when your hands are gigantic paper mache sculptures with gross eyeballs in them!

So who is she, exactly? Tegan is a kaiju based on the idea of a disobedient, unsupervised child in a retail setting. Imagine that horrible girl. Her fingers are sticky and she has to touch everything she sees! Now imagine that she has been transformed into a forty meter high monster who is capable of battling Ultraman, and you'll have the right idea. She looks like she is either laughing or screaming all the time. You probably can't even tell which!

I needed to give her a name, so I did some research and made a list of Japanese words that related to the character. Since the kaiju in shows like Ultraman are often given names that are just wordplay based on their physical characteristics, I wanted to do the same sort of thing here.

There were plenty of options that sounded more monstery, but I didn't really love any of them. 'Tegan' is a portmanteau of Japanese words for hand and eyeball. That in itself makes it good enough, but even better, it's a believable name for a horrible little girl who turns into a giant monster. Does it mean that every girl named Tegan is a destructive monster? Of course not! But if there was a news report about a little girl who grew to be forty meters high and started rampaging through an outlet mall, would you be surprised to find out that her name was Tegan? You would not.

Today is October 30, 2023. Tomorrow... we rampage!

...and hopefully more to come!

Vicki, the creepy ragdoll, is my partner Bill.

Vicki was his idea. While I was responsible for actually creating most of the costume, we developed her together from his sketch. And since I can barely see where I'm going, I followed Vicki around a lot on Halloween!

Although it's hard for me to tell what's going on when I'm wearing the Tegan costume, I was very aware that we were photographed. Many, many times! So I'm hoping that we will collect a few more pictures of the Halloween event downtown, because we rocked it.