Disco Liam

Recently, I had a chance to get creative, and it was awesome. I haven’t done something really creative for a while. In fact the last thing I did that was really creative would of been the first issue of my zine “Floods of Vomit Issue 1″, some 3 years ago.

I recently attended the Invisible Circus’s Day of the Dead Ball. The dress code was a strict “Dead Cool” so clearly I had to make an effort. I decided that face paint wasn’t an option as I wasn’t walking around the mean streets of Bristol all dolled up, so I decided to make a mask.

It been a long time since I’d done anything in Paper Mache. The last thing I made was a giant yellow duck with a friend for his girlfriend, and I’m told it didn’t really go down that well. Though I don’t think that was due to the quality of the paper mache. I started by designing my mask in Photoshop, quickly with a googled image of a skull and the brush tool. This is what I came up with.

The style ideas came from a few images just found on google. I basically wanted something simplistic and a bit quirky. I think the vision in my head was much clearer than the Image I drew, but it conveys the basic idea. The next step was to get making!

I started off by buying a mask, and using that as a base. I then cut out the skull shape onto a bit of card and attaching it to the mask, but it didn’t look right. I decided that it needed to be deeper, and I should try and make the eyes sink into the mask to try and make it look more like a real skull. So, I used 3 layers of cardboard and made a much thicker version of the skull shape.

Once the pieces had dried, I glued them all together and haded a few more layers of paper mache. This created the deep looking skull shape I was after.

Once I started painting i realised that my water based cheap paint wasn’t going to cover the news paper. So, I decided to mix PVA glue with white paint and do a couple of layers of Paper Mache using Loo Roll. Suffice to say it worked a treat, and also gave my mask a nice ruffled texture, and hid all the lines of the newspaper strips.

Finally all that was left was to do a quick bit of black paint for the dark areas, and use a sharpie for the finer details. And walla, finished.

And here it is, pictured with my counterparts mask for the evening. I think he looks good, bringing a bit of sophistication to events with his classy mo.

The event it self was excellent, and even though it was a Sunday night, I had a thoroughly enjoyable time. The space the Invisible Circus have for themselves is just increadible, and the amount of effort put into decorating it for this event was worth the ticket price alone. I really recomend going to one of their events if you can, as they really are stunning.