Masks

In this project, we were assigned to look at different masks from around the world. We were first assigned to find a mask that we were interested in. I chose the mask below. I liked this mask because it was very different from everything else I saw on the website. The mask is called "Mexican Mermaid Mask" and came from Guerrero, Mexico. It is characterized as a decorative or "tourist" mask and was made sometime in the 1970's. I took inspiration from this mask, and made a drawing of how I wanted it to look. The first step in making our masks was to form newspaper into the shape we wanted for our masks. I formed my newspaper into the shape of a head. I then rolled out a slab of clay and laid it over the newspaper to make the face of my mask. I cut the excess clay off of the edges and started to carve out the eyes. I cut the eyes out of the mask. To do this I used a needle tool and made the eyes curved at the edges. I then formed a nose out of clay and scored and slipped it onto the face. Then, I moved onto making the tail. To do this, I formed newspaper into a tail shape and laid another slab over it. While making the tail, I didn't have the face covered with plastic properly so it dried out really fast. I then spent some time trying to revive the face (thanks Mr. A for spraying it 3 times a day!!). After I made the base of my tail, I started making scales. To make the scales, I cut scale-shaped pieces out of a slab and placed them where I think they should go on the tail. When I was finished making and placing the scales, I began to stick them on. I poked holes in the base of the tail before I stuck on the scales so that they didn't fall off in the kiln. When I was done doing that, I started to make the flipper at the end of the tail. I did this by cutting the basic shape out of a slab, then sticking strips of clay on that to make it to give it more texture instead of painting the lines. After I was done, I made finishing touches by just smoothing it out and making sure there were no small specks of clay on it. After that, I made eyebrows on the face by carving them with a needle tool. While this was happening, Mr. A reminded me that the kiln won't hold anything larger than 2 feet tall, and my mask was very big. I decided to make the tail shorter, as it was very large and wasn't very proportionate to the head. After it was bisque fired, I started to glaze it. For the face, I didn't want to use a certain skin color, so I chose a very light green glaze. I painted my face with the glaze, and very carefully made the eyebrows with temmoku. For the tail, I chose to use indigo float and temmoku. I chose indigo float because I thought that it would look good with the light green. I chose temmoku because it would match the eyebrows nicely. The also painted the inside of the eyes with indigo float. After it came out of the kiln, I liked it a lot. The colors didn't turn out how I thought they were, but I liked it the way it was.