Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Maker Camp 2015 – Make Cardboard Masks”.
My name is dax tran cafe, and this is my workshop, where i build lots of things, including puppets tools. Robots sewing stuff cardboard today, i’m going to show you how to build some masks with cardboard, so we’re going to make masks out of cardboard. I have here a cardboard box. Any cardboard box will do um, bigger the better uh we’re going to be using hot glue gun. It can be enormous, like this one here or normal size like that hot glue and then we’re also going to be using utility knives.
Various sorts – and i have this – fancy – cutting mat, self-healing cutting mat here and you can actually use anything um, a scrap of cardboard or a piece of plywood first step is to make a crown for your head um to put the mask on. I want a strip. That’S going to be long enough to go all the way around my head, which is pretty long. It’S something like two or three feet. So a piece here wouldn’t be long enough. I’M going to have to go for something in here, so this is going to go around my head to make it bend easier, i’m going to pre-bend it like, so you can also pull it along the edge of a table and making sure that that’s the right Size the size that i want, i am going to glue it here and the ink glue it in place and i’m not going to put it back on my head until that glue is dry because horrible things happen when you get hot glue in your hair. Alright, i think that’s dry enough, so this is going to go on my head eventually, but in order to keep it from falling off, if my mask is really heavy, i need to put a piece in around the back like this shove some glue in here. So far, i’ve made a crown which uh looks like this, but you can see how this strap down here like grabs the bottom of my skull there, which will keep the mask from falling off the front okay.
So the next part is that i don’t want the mask to be right on my face, because that would not only look not as cool, but it would get in the way of my nose. So i want to build off the front of this crown. So the mask can be spaced off of my head a little bit, i’m going to cut two strips and then i’m just going to glue them off of the sides kind of like horns or antenna or something, and then i’m going to fold tabs over here so That i can glue the mask onto these a nice little right angle. These things that stick off at the front are kind of wobbly.
They go back and forth and i want them to be really sturdy if they’re going to hold a heavy mask in order to do that, i’m just going to put a piece of cardboard across like this. So now i can just start like building anything. I want on here, and it’s going to be really strong and sturdy. I like starting with ovals, you can make a mask of any shape, but we’ll start with something kind of oval-ish uh.
If you like, making your stuff nice and perfect – that’s cool, i i don’t. I, like making my stuff very like odd ovals with weird raggedy edges. I think that gives things more personality more character. But if you like perfect things, that’s cool too.
So i’m going to take this oval and i don’t like that. It’S flat, it doesn’t have much character when it’s flat, so i’m going to bend it down the middle normally when we think of masks, we think of them like in front of our face like so, but this is not as cool um for this type of mask. Uh what you want for this type of mask is for it to be above your face, so that you’re like looking under the chin. So when i i’m just gon na stick this on here, i’m gon na put some hot glue on these two little tabs and then i’m just going to like shove this on here, but that’s basically uh the mask.
You could like stop here and be um no face from spirited away, but i’m going to take it a little bit farther, i’m going to say we need eyeballs and a snout, so i’ve got here a sharpie or a pencil or something or you could just eyeball It i’m going to draw where i intend to cut so i’m going to draw some eyes there. You don’t ever really want to just like cut with knives in the air. That gets a little bit scary. So i’m going to put it sort of on something that i can cut against and then cut it down here. So now we have a mask with eyes and now the awesome part is to make a snout okay. So this is just going to stick off the front and it’s going to turn this thing into like an animal, and i could just put glue on this edge. That is possible. It won’t be very strong, but we’ll we’ll start with that, and then i reinforced it as you can see here, with um uh squares of cardboard folded in half and shoved into the crease and those are just hot glued there uh and that’s such a stronger, better Way to attach things, i’m going to add teeth because teeth are awesome and i’m just going to like stick some triangles onto the bottom of the snout, and that will be teeth and i can add ears too.
I might take a piece like this fold. It a little bit so it’s got some dimension and then stick it on somehow um and then this other ear i’m going to make it a square because because weird things are awesome, but this crease right here makes things so much more dimensional uh out of just Like a flat piece of cardboard, so i love creasing things bending them and then sticking them on. I think this is basically it right.
We could paint this up. We could make it nice. We could like uh, clean up these edges if i wanted to with scissors.
So that they’re, not so square uh, and then i can um put it on so theoretically, this all holds together now and it should be very strong and it shouldn’t fall off my head. I think, because i didn’t make it quite too heavy, but now that you have this mask, you can go and use it in performance for your film or whatever you want to do with it. .