Info 10 - Creation of the mask (Patreon)

It's no secret that Emamouse is my favorite artist, period. Everything from her music, described suitably in her her Bandcamp Daily feature, her sense of fashion and to the signature mask she is seen wearing at all times. I found a lot in common with her visual works as well, which are odd and free-flowing images, often including food with faces, posted on twitter, sold in manga, and used as her album art. She's served as a huge inspiration to my own life and work, and I respect her so much. 

Anime Central is going on now, and I decided to try a new sort of costume craft  out this year. I've always wanted to make a felt mask much like Emamouse wears, but with my character's face instead. The elements I decided to borrow from hers are the eyes and the style in which the whole thing is stitched together.

In this post I'll show step by step how I created the mask.

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Using a big stack of felt material my mom kept around for a long time, I took note of which colors I had available and which I wouldn't be able to use. There was just enough white and tan colored felt to be able to form a face and hair, so I had gotten pretty lucky from the start.

From then I drafted up a drawing using only the colors of felt and thread that I knew I had available. Each sheet of felt was only 9x12, so the ways that I had planned to stitch together the hair eventually had to change a bit, but the drawing helped so much in the planning process.

Using the drawing, I started with the face, cutting out pieces of felt to layer and pin together. You can see from this point I used purple along the top half of the face in an effort to make her look even more in distress but in the end it ended up looking like she was wearing a superhero mask. 

After pinning most of the facial features, I realized I didn't like most of it, so I went back to working on the design.

Making the eyes smaller and  underneath the purple layer, as well as adding the brown eyebrows...

Adding another skin-colored felt piece on top of the purple layer, intentionally leaving the purple areas on the sides as it wouldn't be visible when the hair was overlapped later on. Also began stitching the facial features together at this point, starting with the pupils and nose.

Facial features were almost all finished being stitched, so I started to plan out the approach to doing the hair. At this point I still wanted the hair to be white, as I didn't have enough grey felt.

I felt like it looked too much like Danny Phantom or something, but continued. I was temporarily pinning together the bottom half of the mask, which is what gave it the weird square jaw effect.

It looked pretty rough inside. I still didn't know the "proper" way to end a seam, and didn't think of googling how to do it.

The outside didn't look great as well, I stitched together the pieces of white felt all around the top and sides to form the hair, adding two grey "sideburns" to cover up the edges of the mask. I also cut out two small holes to see through it.

I really hated how it looked, and started shopping for grey felt material. Eventually I had found some and had it overnight shipped so I could start again on the hair the next day.

In the time I was waiting for the grey felt to come in, I decided to work on the leaves that would be stitched to the hair. I cut out two oversided leaves and used green thread to detail the veins and black thread to hold the two together.

Then the next day the felt shipment came in. I didn't take any images of the fairly short 1-day process of stitching the grey felt around it, but I did take an image of how it looked right after.

At this point the bottom half of the face was still being held in shape by pins, so I started to think of ideas to get the bottom half to form around my face without it sticking straight out and deforming. 

I started to work on a cardboard underside to hold the face in shape, but eventually scrapped the idea because I didn't have the time nor tools. Instead I stitched the face into a nice, round shape and then left some room for a small pocket under the chin to hold a small weight in place. These weights would weigh the chin down to prevent the bottom side of the mask from raising up deforming the whole face.

I then cut the hair's details out and redid some earlier stitches to better suit the shape of my face. Then I used a small piece of red felt and some red thread to make the mouth detail.

Here is the nearly completed mask laid out, like a sad jellyfish. You can still see the white hair underneath the grey, which I decided to keep to add additional weight to the mask.

Finally, not pictured, another small pocket was added to the back of the hair to add a counter weight to the chin weight, helping to secure the mask in place and preventing the action of walking around from shuffling the mask around and making it difficult to see.

This entire process took about 4 days of nearly non-stop work from sunrise to sunset, and the end result still looks a bit wacky but I'm pleased. 

At the time of this posting, I'll be at Anime Central, so if you're going I hope to see you there! If not, I'll be sure to post lots of images, or at least a few good ones. This is the event I look forward to most every year.

Thank you for reading, and for your continued support :>