Step 1: Celluclay over a generic plastic face mold.

After letting my bag of mixed Celluclay sit untouched in the fridge for over a week, this weekend I finally decided to try to make my first venetian mask. I formed the stuff over a generic plastic face mold, then spent about an hour smoothing it around, filling in gaps, and adding some bulk to the nose and brows to customize the basic shape. Now it’s sitting on my oven drying – a process that’ll take about 24 hours.

Celluclay is a form of retail paper mache that behaves a lot like clay, then hardens into a solid form that can be sanded and carved and cut to a nice smooth finish, then painted or decorated. This is the first time I’ve worked with anything like Celluclay, and I think I like it, although I am definitely going to need to get a few masks under my belt before I feel like I have a good sense of how to work it and mold it to my satisfaction. This feels like a pretty good first try, though. I’ve made masquerade masks for theatre productions before, but it was over 15 years ago and back then we used different materials.

I’ll keep taking pictures and sharing what this process is like. I plan to make several masks in the future and I want to keep a record of what it was like to create the very first one.

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