The making of "The Goat" mask [7]

At this point I needed to make holes so I could see and breathe with my nose.

At first I tried to cut it with a knife or a box cutter, but it was no use. It barely made a scratch. So With a heating gun I decided to heat a certain part of the mask and there i could cut it much easier. Ant it worked, but it still wasn’t easy, but I could at least make it like this.

It was very sloppy and it had very sharp ends.

At this point I found small wood carving tools, very sharp and small, great for what I needed.

Now the say I did it was basically the same as before, but in order to make it better, after I made the bigger hole, I would only heat a little of the edges in order to make them a little softer, and I worked the material like that. And afterwards I would heat them again and rub the edges less sharp.

After this it was a working on the holes to make it fit my face better.

The making of "The Goat" mask [6]

Now the next step was to make the upper face for the mask. So, fist I thought on making a mold of my head, but soon threw that idea way, since I had no idea how I would make one with what I had. Than I thought on making a face with aluminium foil and make it over, but soon I came to the conclusion that it was more difficult than I thought.

With playing around with the Polymorph I found that I could pass it through cold water and the outside part of the plastic would become just a little but harder, making it still possible to mold, but not being as hot as it once was, or sticky.

So, first I started to make a flat sheet with that plastic, and still heating it up in a recipient with boiling water. When I managed to get a size I thought would be enough I proceeded by bringing it to my bathroom.

It's hard to see, but there is a plastic sheet in there.

I laid myself in the shower with cold water running, than I took the sheet of plastic, passed it once through cold water and pressed it to my face. Pressing it to become the shape of my face. With cold water it made it hard extremely fast, and I only had to lay there for about 5 to 10 min.

Now I had the shape of my face, and the upper part of face of the mask.

The face mask right after it was made, illuminated from under it

The face mask seen from the inside

Cowboy

The making of "The Goat" mask [5]

With a recipient full of boiling water I started to bend both of the parts I previously made. In this part I had to change the water to heat it again. In order to make it easier I used two similar recipients, this way I could change the pieces living them always in hot water, and then heat he water from the other one.

In the picture above you can see the recipient with the hot water and both pieces of the jaw inside. The spoon is so I could touch and move both pieces without burning myself. You can also see the piece in the left is see trough in the upper part. That is how the material looks like when it's possible to mold.

In this part I had to be careful because if I let the piece till like this for too long it would start to stick to the recipient.

After working on this a while I finally had the form that I wanted. And so, like you can see in the picture above, I dipped the points in the hot water to the point they became to the point of fusion and than I fused them together.

You can see in the pictures above that the union wasn't perfectly centered, but that wasn't a problem because I could make the line vanish by heating it and molding it.

From Within

The making of "The Goat" mask [4]

Now that I had the basic ideas ready, I filled a recipient with hot boiling water put the quantity of plastic that I thought would be enough for the chin.

With it at the point that I could mold, sometimes I took it out and pressed everything together, in order to make a more uniform shape, and closer to how i wanted it.
After some time I got it in a shape that was close to what I wanted. I than passed through cold water, in order to make it become hard without having to wait a long time.

As you can see in the picture above they are about the same size, but the one on the right is a little bit longer.
I made sure they were about the same in every way but I could change it in case it wasn't.

The next point was to put both parts together, but for that to happen both had to be bent, before or after putting'em together.
I decided to bend them first and only after put it together.

And so I did...

The making of "The Goat" mask [3]

Since I had never worked with this material before, I had to start somewhere.
So, after plying a little bit with the plastic, understanding a little bit better of how it worked, I was almost ready to start.

Before actually starting to mold the final form, the work had to be divided into different smaller parts or segments.

When playing with the plastic, I learned that if you heated two different parts of plastic to the molding point you could stick those two parts together, and it would fuse into one piece.
This was key a really important kind of knowledge, because it meant that I could divide the project into really small peaces and pot it all together just by heating them together.

So then I preceded to first dividing the mask in three "big" segments. The jaw, the face and the horns.

With all of this in mind I had to start somewhere, so I decided to start with the jaw.

In order to learn a little better how to make them, I started by looking at different pictures of jaws.
To make it easier to build I preceded by dividing the jaw into two parts, those would be two equal parts, the jaw would be divided in the middle, made by to equal parts. Than when the two parts would be partially made I would heat them together.