Looking Out To Sea

Last Friday… it seems so long ago… we went out to Nick’s for a Birthday Masquerade Ball. There were a small number of people who made their own masks, though not always successfully. José made himself a Zorro-style mask with the eye holes too far apart, so wore it round his forehead all evening instead. Oh well.

We decided to go the extra effort and made some moulded masks using a technique Helen learned from a youth drama group. This is how it’s done.

You will need:

Gummed Parcel Tape

This stuff isn’t easy to come by nowadays. It’s basically a long strip of brown paper (in a roll like masking tape) which is gummed on one side like a stamp. The glue on the reverse is quite mild and you don’t need to mess about with papier mache and the attendant bucket of cold gloopy paste. We had a short length of the tape pre-ripped into little shreds before we started. If you want to get a close fit to the face then small pieces are advisable.

Sponge

A nice wet sponge in a bowl of water will save your tongue from certain doom. I don’t know how horrendous it would be to lick all these bits of tape into place. Too much to contemplate.

Hair clips

If your hair is short enough you won’t need to bother, but if you’ve got any sort of fringe it’s useful to pin it out of the way. Kirby grips to the rescue!

Moisturiser

Don’t know if this is completely necessary but it probably helps to moisten up the skin a bit to survive the onslaught of the glue. By the end you’ll feel like you’ve had some sort of chemical peel. Also, I found shaving to be useful — I don’t think this would be possible with proper beard/moustache growth.

All you need to do is rip the tape into little bits: about the size of a pound coin is good enough. Regular shapes are not necessary. Just tear them up. Then quickly wet the shiny side and stick to your face. We found it best to start with the forehead because it’s wide and reasonably flat. The paper should stick easily. Then just expand out the way, overlapping the bits to build up a continuous covering.

Because there were two of us we sat face-to-face and applied the glued paper to each other’s faces. I don’t know what it would be like to do your own. After a while you have to concentrate on not making any facial expressions that you don’t want the resulting mask to reflect. It’s really hard to stare at someone for an hour without making any expression. Also, people who make no expression tend to look extremely miserable. It’s very worrying.

The area of face you cover is up to you. For our Ball masks we did the forehead, cheek bones and nose, adding on extra at the edges so there would be plenty to trim. When you think you’re done, so that the resulting mask will be structurally sound and well-covered, leave it to dry. Which is to say, sit back and try not to disturb it. The drying doesn’t actually take long, maybe half an hour extra.

Peeling off the mask is tricky, because you want it to just fall off your face, rather than actively pulling it off. Pulling at your cheeks to stretch the skin away from the paper, wrinkling your forehead and flaring your nostrils are all effective means of loosening the glue from your skin. I guess a good application of moisturiser would be good at this point. Vaseline or something might have been even better, but we didn’t go that far. I imagine a full face mask will be considerably harder to remove.

Once the mask comes off you can hold it up to the light and see if there are any holes that need patching. Weak spots will be quite obvious. We discovered that leaving the masks to dry facing up will tend to “widen” the face, so that it no longer fits so snugly. Try to avoid this. If you’ve got a half-mask it should be easy to prop it up so that there is no bad stretching.

Once it’s dry you’ll realise that your new mask fits your face perfectly and doesn’t need any elastic or anything else to hold it in place. Especially if your nose was moulded well you should have a very sturdy “second skin” that fits you perfectly and isn’t uncomfortable.

It took us a couple of days to get to the painting stage. First we had to trim the masks to shape, removing any rough edges and asymmetrical bits. It’s useful to draw on the mask with a felt pen while you wear it, to get an idea how it will look when you’ve trimmed it. Getting the symmetry right is really hard, and you have to do it with respect to your face anyway, since it probably won’t be millimetre-perfect either!

I used white poster paint for mine, which took about four coats to hide the brown paper underneath. Helen went for black and only needed one coat to hide the colour. Everything else was just touching up. You might want to use nicer paints or some coating to give a gloss (though this will tend to highlight the uneven surface below). At this stage you can just go with whatever fits your needs. We had no real plan so I just left mine plain, while Helen went with a simple gathering of black feathers from a haberdashery.

I rather enjoyed this little mask-making exercise and would definitely do it again given the excuse. The biggest surprise for me was how easy and comfortable it was to wear the resulting mask. It just sits on the face without clips, elastic, glue or the need to hold a stick.

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