DIY- Minotaur Halloween costume

This year, for Halloween, awesome paper-craftster Jacob (and my hubby) and I decided to go for a Greek mythology monsters theme. However, we were a bit underwhelmed by the usual plain toga idea so we thought of mixing other cultural elements to the costumes.

I picked a Kabuki-inspired Medusa and he went with a Venitian carnival Minotaur.

Here's the Minotaur in all its glory and we're pretty psyched about it! :D



Step-by-step:

First, Jacob made a rough structure for the bull head. I'm always impressed at how he can capture the basic essence of a shape with very little effort. Here' the bovine shape made out of a cereal box:



The horns were molded out of good old papier mâché and some fine wire for support:



Next, Jacob used plaster of Paris to solidify the shape and add more details. Since this is a functional mask and bovine eyes are too far apart to serve as seeing holes for a human, he added a few seeing holes on the front:



The finer details, like eyes and nostrils were made out of a baked clay-like putty (which was lighter than the plaster, as the mask was getting quite heavy), then glued to the plaster head with contact cement:



The final, fully plastered mask model:



It was my turn to paint the bull mask, Venitian style. I began by painting the whole mask with black acrylic paint to create a uniform base:



Then I used a sponge to dab some gold paint mixed with black for a bronze-like effect that would show through the other colours:



Using a warm, antique-white, I outlined the mask's patterns:



It was then only a matter of adding some finer details in gold, black and red paint:



And here's the final Venetian Minotaur mask!



My Medusa costume is coming along well; kimono, snake-wig and all... Pics coming soon!