My children tell me that they love that I’m an artist, and that I have a vast knowledge of how to pull things off for Halloween. Now, of course, they just tell me that so I’ll let them stay up late to watch movies. But I have to admit, I think that their excitement with Halloween, and their interest in doing really cool costumes, is great. If my knowledge of art and technique helps them, then more power to them.
My daughter’s costume was fairly simple, she’s going as “Mother Nature”. That just required an old, dirt-cheap dress (still nice though) from the thrift store (“half off” day too, so it was only $7), some moss from the hobby store, and a few assorted flowers.
My son, however, wanted to be Harvey Dent/Two-Face, from the film The Dark Knight. Now, the cartoon version has a bit of leeway, being animated means you have a little more play on how it looks. The movie version, though, really looks horrific, and takes some trickery to pull off.
After spending at least a couple of weeks trying to convince him to do the animated version, and failing, we went to work on it. Believe me, teenager or not, when he gets an idea in his head it means he wants it to be exactly like he sees it.
The suit was easy enough, once we combed the thrift stores for one. We ended up finding one, and it was also a “half off” day, so we only paid $10 for it. The face though, that required a little more thinking.
We then looked for a Two-Face mask, in case it was easy. It wasn’t (natch), so we then looked for a mask that we could cut up and make work. No go on that either.
I actually did sculpture for several years, prior to getting the publishing work going, so I was fairly confident I could make something work. I also hadn’t really worked with latex rubber before, which is of course much lighter than any of the sculptural clays.
So we started with a Walmart wig (maybe $5), and a plain black plastic mask ($1.50), and put it on one of my mannequin heads. I taped some plastic wrap to the head first, so that the latex had something to sit on (that wasn’t styrofoam).
I then removed the hair from one side of the wig. While this works fine, it also means that my paintings and inks will have hair in them for the foreseeable future. I then taped the mask and wig together in a number of places.
Since my son’s face isn’t actually burned off and caved in, we needed a way to build out the face so that the interior could be seen. I took some of the Wireform mesh that I’ve used for sculpting in the past, and attached it (mostly just with tape) to the plastic mask. I left it raised to pop out the chin more, the cheekbone, and the eye socket.
Then I used a palette knife to lay on the latex, and luckily the mesh was fine enough that it didn’t just sink through. It sat on top quite nicely.
Once that was dry, I started adding black acrylic paint to it. I decided that, since the latex was fairly transparent, that black paint might be a good in-between layer for the mask. Then it might hide the colors and textures under the next layer, instead of such a thick top layer. It didn’t quite cover up the mesh texture, as I’d hoped it would, but a future latex layer would help.
I finished the black paint, and touched it up with areas of red and white. Then I grabbed the Super Sculpey, and sculpted some teeth and gums. Since I was only using it in this one spot, it ended up not being that heavy, so it worked fine. The drawback is that the clay didn’t get fired, and, though Super Sculpey keeps its form pretty well, it’s still slightly soft. It’s not so soft that a simple touch will hurt it, but a decent squeeze would squish it. We ended up going ahead with it (due to time constraints), but it’s something I’ll consider more in the future.
After I was happy with the teeth, I added a little more clay to push up the nose a little (for the hole in it), and to give him an edge where the jaw and cheek skin come back in.
For the tendon/muscles that you can see through his gaping cheek hole, I spread a few lines of latex on a piece of glass, maybe 4-5 inches long. Once those were dry, I pulled them off and painted them with a (purposefully) bad mix of black and red acrylic. Mixing it badly means that there were streaks of black in the red, which worked perfectly for the look. Then I super glued those in place, and pushed the skin around the hole into position.
For the eye, I had a little package of plastic ping pong ball eyeballs from the Halloween store. I cracked one of those in half, and then used my Dremel tool to smooth out the edge. Then I painted over the eye. First with an off-white color, then white, and finally the red and other details. I set it loosely in place in the socket, and then, since I had the Dremel out anyway, went ahead and cut the plastic mask in half.
I then put some latex on the back of the eye, and set it in place. Then I went over the clay with paint to get it to look right, and put latex over the spots that needed it.
After the final coat of latex dried, I went back over things with the paint and touched up some areas. I also added a little more latex on the plastic edge, so that it wasn’t so sharp and uncomfortable. At the end, it turned out like this:
The character’s clothes, in the movie anyway, are pretty simple. He has a gray suit, white shirt, and striped tie. The damage from the fire only affects the jacket really, so we set out to just do the same. We took the jacket, and, after discussing some options, decided on a plan.
Since the jacket was wool, and wouldn’t just blow up in our faces (like polyester), we just took a few matches and burned spots where we needed them based on the character from the film. We then took some watered down acrylic, and applied inside the holes to match the reddish color of the interior of the character’s suit (our interior was white). I then sprayed a textured paint over the burn area.
It worked great, and we ended up with a nice texture. But the white was a bit much, and distracting, so I just touched up those areas with a paintbrush and black acrylic paint. It took awhile, but at least I had an excuse to watch Dark City again.
Then we were done, and my son went off to school with his Harvey Two-Face outfit on. Crossed fingers that they don’t toss him out for being too “gory”. He also had a double sided coin, which luckily came with the Two-Face movie figure that he had.
We took a last photo too, to get the whole effect. It might as well be a dramatic photo, right?
