"They Live" DIY Mask Making!

It's no real secret that I like dressing up, especially if it means I get to make elaborate costumes :) (Mermaid, sock monkey, Legolas, Leia etc... ) We are going to our second annual May the Fourth party next weekend so we had to come up with a new costume idea. Somehow we hit on "They Live", a movie I'd never even heard of until A mentioned it last week. After watching it at the weekend, I was sold! I google searched for a tutorial to make masks and came across two here (MAKE) and here (Instructables), and have hybridized the two with a few of my own changes based on materials at hand. We are about half way though making our masks, and this is how we've done it so far.

Step 1: The base mask
Both tutorials recommend buying two masks (a plain blank white one and a skull one) and then gluing them together. Instead we went with one papier-mâché skull each, purchased for $12 a pop. This seemed pretty reasonable to me since the alien faces are basically exposed skulls so by using a molded mask underneath we could get away with less modeling clay later on.

The mask didn't fit my lady sized face very well, so I had to soak the nose region and push the indented area out which is why it looks a little bit busted here. I've covered this up on the outside at a later step, and I'm going to pad the inside of the mask so it sits more comfortably on my nose.

Step 2: Apply the muscle tissue
The first tutorial recommends using instant papier-mâché to make the muscle-like tissue of the alien faces. But I'm a quilter and I have a lot of tiny scraps of batting around so I decided to try using that.

Adam tore thin strips of batting which I then soaked in watered-down Elmer's Glue (maybe 70% glue) and applied to the mask with liberal squishing and scrunching to make something approximating tissue.

I roughly followed the layout of the MAKE tutorial as to where I put the batting, mostly on the forehead and around the cheekbones/jowls. I put a very smooth layer over my mask's busted nose hole too. To finish, I added a thin layer of glue-water to smooth down an flyaway fibers. They we blow-dried a little to set the surface...

... and left them alone for two days to dry. Why two days? Because Tuesday night is trivia night ;)

Step 3: Sculpting the facial features
For this part we took advice from the Instructable tutorial and used Crayola Model Magic, except that we decided that since the finished product needed to be blue, why not just use blue clay to begin with!

The clay was super easy to work with, but needed a bit of persuading to smooth out joins. Mostly I just rubbed lightly until the worst cracks went away. There seemed to be no problem with the clay adhering to the mask's painted surface but it clung a little too much to the batting to allow for repositioning.

We each sculpted our own masks, leading to two pretty distinctively different faces. I'll let you guess which one was mine, with a hint that I might have watched all seasons of Bones... twice. One 4oz package was enough to do two masks, but you might need more if you didn't use a mask that was already skull shaped.

We're going to let these dry for a couple of days (why? Because tonight we're going to see a Grease and Grease 2 themed burlesque show!) then will start painting!

Tutorial Part 2