Ashley Mask

Let me introduce you to Ashley. She is the only teenage sasquatch at her high school. While Ashley dreams of a future in the fashion industry, she lives in a small town where not even one store caters to her body type. In many ways, Ashley feels like she is just biding her time until she can escape to someplace that offers more opportunities.

It's impossible to talk about Ashley without talking about Shannon. A single mom, Shannon gets to work at 4:30 in the morning six days a week. She works her big blue butt off, waiting tables at the truck stop breakfast shift, because she wants to give her daughter everything. If that means saving up all she can and sending Ashley away to fashion school, Shannon is prepared to let her go. She prepares herself every night.

Ashley doesn't really appreciate everything her mom does for her. Everything she is willing to do for her. But she's a teenager, it's not her job to understand that yet. Ashley is just figuring out who she is, and Shannon is the one stable feature in her life. Like many young folks, Ashley learns who she is by differentiating herself from her mother.

That dynamic informed my experience as a maskmaker too. I built Shannon first, months before I even knew that she had a daughter! When the idea of Ashley began taking shape, she was immediately defined by the ways that she was unlike her mom:

Blue and orange has long been my favorite color combination, so the first decision I made was that Ashley would be orange, because Shannon was already blue.

Shannon is a middle-aged waitress and she embraces that aesthetic: false lashes, pink lipstick and a messy beehive. Ashley would adopt more dramatic, sixties-inspired fashion choices: a smooth bubble flip hairstyle, black and white chevron headband, and white lipstick, with elaborate glam eye makeup.

She was gonna be beautiful, and she would be even bigger than her mom!

Ashley is built from lots of strips of cardboard, loads of masking tape, some duct tape, paper mache, and paper clay. She was painted with cheap acrylic paints. Useful tools include scissors, a craft knife, clay working tools, and an old music stand with the top removed.

I began by constructing a large scaffolding made of cardboard strips and tape. Since Ashley was a blood relative of Shannon, it made sense to strive to build the same basic shape for the structure of the mask. Like Shannon, the Ashley mask uses a large curved flange at the bottom, which sits on the shoulders and scoops down low on the chest. A sturdy neck that widens at the base. I basically copied the first design, and stretched a long piece of cardboard to denote the top and bottom edges of her face area.

If you're going to build a mask like this for personal use, the main things to keep in mind are that the flange needs to work on your shoulders, and you'll need to make sure that the eye holes eventually line up with your eye line. But you've still got a day or two before you make it that far!

Shannon's hairstyle had been complex because of the detail involved, but it was built directly onto the original form. Ashley's hair was like a whole separate monster, and I wasn't sure how the heck I was going to do it!

As is the case with any build where I don't know how I'm going to do it, I just did it. I'd already made the main form (basically, Ashley's skull) so now I needed to build a bubble flip hairdo on top of it. Armed with the same big strips of corrugated cardboard and rolls of tape, I began to construct the shape of a hairdo.

I've been using the bottom part of one of those old, metal, telescoping music stands as a base when I make these larger masks, and it works out pretty well. In Ashley's case, it was especially useful because she's really unwieldy, and the stand makes it easy to turn her, and to walk all the way around her. Building the shape of the hairdo required constant wandering! I built the bubble up from the top and out from the back, leaving it tight to the front of her head because Ashley was going to be wearing a headband.

To begin the flip at the bottom, I literally just taped strips of carboard together to make a point, and then attached the two ends to Ashley's head to make a 'swoop'. Six or seven of these carried the flip all the way around the back of her head.

At this point, the mask looks ridiculous. Honestly, reviewing these photos, I kinda can't believe it worked! But that's what I love about paper mache. If it hadn't worked, it would be easy to pull apart and try again, but paper mache is so freaking versatile that you can get terrific results from even the dumbest ideas!

My plan for Ashley's hair was that it should be smooth, without the individual strands visible on her mother. But it still needed to have some shape and texture to it, because it wasn't meant to be a helmet! This next step was going to determine a lot of that shape.

First, using more strips of cardboard, I joined the ends of the flips together. By forcing some to go up a little, some to go down a little, the flip started to show buoyancy instead of just hanging there.

Then I covered the whole exterior with masking tape, which creates a surface for paper mache even as it reveals the whole shape of the hairdo for the first time.

Here I applied the first layer of paper mache, covering the whole exterior of the hairdo. While it was all still wet, I attached a piece of masking tape to the foremost flip on one side of Ashley's head, ran the tape all the way up over her crown and down to the flip on the opposite side. This hoisted the flips so they would keep looking buoyant and bouncy as they dried! I did the same thing to the flip in the very back, hoisting it with a strip of tape run all the way up over the crown and attaching to Ashley's forehead area.

When this first coat was stable, I connected the undersides of all the flips and approached them the same way I had the top: sealing it over with masking tape before giving the entire structure a coat of paper mache. I carried the paper mache from underneath the flips right on down the back of her neck, to make the whole thing secure. Now everything except the front was bound together!

The time had come to form the foundation of the face. Most of the details would be added later, with paper clay, but I needed to build her heavy brow and her big round muzzle first.

I put Ashley on, and I marked the height of my eye on either side of the face. Then I attached a broad strip of cardboard across the opening at the same height as my eyeline.

I started to form the brows by attaching skinny pieces of cardboard at the top of the face area, bringing them down and bending them into place before taping them to the eyeline. You can see in the photos that each side of her brow is formed by three narrow cardboard strips, which will take on the proper shape when they are covered over.

The muzzle was formed by attaching a piece of cardboard to the bottom of the eyeline, in the middle, between the two brows. Curved outward and taped to the base of the throat, that cardboard strip formed the center line of the muzzle, and the rest was built out to the sides in the same manner. Once the new area has been covered with tape, you can finally start to see what she might eventually look like. Now all the new areas needed to be papered over too.

The final part of the sub-structure would be the front of Ashley's hairdo, the pieces that come down from the sides of her head band to frame her face. Once those were in place, it was time for the fun part.

I made Ashley's face and the rest of her details over the next nine days. Smoothing and shaping the brows, adding eyelids, and placing the nose were the first orders of business. The beginnings of an expression, these features suggested how her mouth and jaw would be set.

All the while, I continued to fuss with her hair. Now that she was coming into focus, it was easier to see where her 'do required a little reshaping. The only guidance I can offer is to simply spend a lot of time with her, examining her from all angles, and don't be afraid to try things out. Ashley is paper, not stone, and easy to reshape if you don't enjoy the results.

The heavy clay additions began with her lower lip, and the jaw shape that followed it. Her little chin buttoned in that glorious frown, which I was only too happy to complete with an equally sneersome upper lip.

There is no right or wrong way to proceed here. She is whatever character you want her to be. Or whatever character she chooses to be, depending on how willing you are to imbue your creations with external personalities.

I had an idea in my mind of what kind of girl Ashley was, and with clay in hand, I set out to find her. Ashley is proud, petulant, and sincere. She's an outsider – almost inevitably – but confident. Ashley rolls her eyes at her mother's eclectic earrings and old-fashioned ways, but would be her fiercest defender if anyone else dared to say anything against her.

After establishing all of these new facial features, and several refinements on her bubble flip (including bangs!), I covered the whole darn thing with another layer of paper mache.

At this stage, I took another turn inside the mask. Taking a series of reference photos is always a good idea, especially after spending a lot of time working at such close quarters with her. It's the best way to step back and see how well she is actually working. Personally, I have always found that there are certain problems that seem clearer to me in pictures than in real life.

I could see from the photos that Ashley's face still needed a little bit of work, but she was pretty close to where I wanted her.

The biggest task remaining was to do something about the edges of the flip, which were still a series of straight slashes, like the outline of a spider web. They needed to be broken up to show that this was hair, so I used cylindrical shapes about the thickness of my thumb, blended into the surroundings. Varying the length and depth of these additions went a long way toward fixing those straight edges, and selling the 'reality' of the character.

And I gave Ashley a beauty mark, because she is so beautiful.

Before getting down to the paint job, which was going to be the other fun part, it was time to remove the scaffolding. Turning Ashley upside down, I started digging 'round inside her head and tearing out all the cardboard strips that were not structurally necessary anymore. It doesn't represent a huge amount of the total weight, but every bit helps! Then a final layer of paper mache on the inside, and let her dry for a couple of days before sanding her down.

Ashley began with a brown base coat, just like her mother, followed by two or three coats of chrome orange over her face and neck. While that was going on, I also started experimenting with ways to streak some orange into the hairdo.

In fact, I ultimately spent more time on the simple streaks in that bubble flip than I did on her skin, but isn't that always the way?

For Ashley's complexion, I sought the same bold, saturated color on her skin, with the deep brown lowlights. But because the orange of Ashley's skin is a more natural complement to the brown, that transition was much simpler to achieve.

Adding white to chrome orange changes its character too much, so most of the gentle highlighting was achieved with just a bit of yellow.

The paint job was in many ways easier than Shannon's, but it still took a lot of time because the orange has a much, much lower pigment than the blue. On the other hand, ten million coats of a translucent paint actually gives a really interesting result because of the way it interacts with light. Your eye perceives the depth, even if you aren't fully conscious of it.

I spent about four days painting her face and hair, during which the hair changed quite a few times. I experimented with a number of different streaking patterns, some of which had potential, most of which needed to be painted out. Over time, I got there.

When I felt like I was finished, with a touch of alizarine crimson on a dry brush, I blushed Ashley's cheeks.

Now things were about to get crazy. I was going for a strictly black and white motif here, with the makeup and the headband, and this makeup was not going to be subtle.

First the eyeliner, with decorative edges, and eyebrows painted high up on her real brow. I added the first coat of white to her eyes and mouth.

The lips were another deceptively long process. I wanted white lipstick, but you can't just paint it white like clown makeup! That color has to be sculpted on, with dark lowlights. I added an acrylic, pearl-finish medium to some of the paint, and only a few pops of pure white actually remain visible at the end.

You also have to be careful because if you don't use enough contrast, then it all disappears once you take five steps back and it just looks like clown makeup again. But if you use too much, then it will look really weird when you get up close. What I'm saying is, you might fail a bunch of times before you succeed, and that's fine. Maybe you'll succeed, but then just change your mind. I can't promise that I won't repaint Ashley again later!

I finished her eyes with some black plastic jewels that I had around, which I love, but I think it could still be too subtle. I might add some more later on.

Ashley is a great pairing with her mother, conceived at least partially for the sake of drama. And she is dramatic! Two feet high, with a hairdo that sticks out so far that no shelf could possibly hold her. If the fates are kind, there will come a day when both sasquatches will be realized as full costumes, and hit the town together.

We should all be so lucky!