Princess Mononoke Mask
When working with plaster, you often end up with a few inches of leftover material in the bottom of the bucket that hardens before you have time to figure out something to do with it. In this case, I wanted to do something with it after it hardened: practice sculpting and get familiar with how plaster hardens over 48 hours. So I began with a big disk of plaster and wracked my brains for something I could sculpt out of it. My roommate at the time had many Princess Mononoke figurines, and it occurred to me that the mask in her costume would work out to the approximate size and shape of my bucket bottom.
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So I began to sculpt. Several days later, and when it started to get very hard, I had the basic shape, and began rounding out the edges. I didn't think it would go much further than that. But as I realized I also had some leather scraps and several friends who were interested in having a mask at home, I decided to try wet molding the leather on the shape. It worked out quite well and with a few layers of acrylic paint, it almost looks like lacquered wood, which is what I imagine it to be made out of.
​But then I realized I had to attach it to a fur base to make it look like in the movie. And of course, it wasn't complete without the ears, which I sculpted on the opposite side of the plaster mould, and formed inside-out to get a nice ridge on the edge.
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One thing led to another and I have made about 4 of these by now... all to avoid wasting plaster.
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It's meant as a wall ornament but I have been wondering if I could make it into a wearable mask for a costume...
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UPDATE:
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I have a bunch of little scraps of worbla that I picked up from classes last year, and I was itching for a small sculpting project. In addition, when I put the Mononoke mask up on the wall with the green wallpaper, it crossed my mind that it would be cool to make little forest sprite characters (kodama) to go with it. So one night after work, in front of the television, I got to sculpting these little fellas from a basic sketch. The bigger pieces are shaped around a core of scrunched up paper to minimize the weight and amount of material needed, and the shapes are built up through successive layers of worbla. I love to work with this stuff though I still have trouble estimating its temperature and sometimes burn my fingers.
Then I painted them with acrylic paint, off white, with dark green shading, and attached them to the wall with double sided tape.
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I got this wallpaper from Spoonflower, an awesome website for custom printed fabric goods. This is the peel and stick removable wallpaper, which comes prepasted and can be removed without any damage to the wall, which is a pretty cool feature. I love the design because it has a Studio Ghibli feel to it, and it works really well with the mask and kodama colors.
