Halloween Goblin Heads Ready for Painting

Goblin heads ready for painting.

These heads are part of a larger project.  I am working on a life-size doll for Halloween.  She is supposed to holding up the heads of the Goblins.

I started the project thinking I would make some gruesome shrunken heads.  However, the project was not going well in a number of areas. Things were just not working as I planned.  Sometimes it is just better to figure out something better than the original plan.  So I changed my plan from shrunken heads to Goblins. 

A Coke can for size reference.

I had drilled holes into the heads because the mouths and eyes would have been sewn shut.  I needed to do something with the holes.  I had made eyes for the shrunken heads, but the eyes were small because they would have been dehydrated.  They were not going to be the right size for a normal head.    Rather than trash the project completely, I cut out the eyes and mouths with a craft knife and filled them in using paper clay.  Hopefully, those areas will not be as noticeable once the heads are painted.  The noses were also small, but I left them, because who knows what a Goblin nose looks like anyway.

First strip layers over the skull mold.

One of the skulls removed from the mold in pieces.

I painted some flat back glass marbles (the kind used in floral and home decorating) with black glass paint and heated them to make the paint bond permanently.  (By the way, I have a small dedicated toaster oven for these projects.  It saves on having to clean a home oven after using that product.)  I ran into some unexpected problems with the eyes.  I made three pair of eyes all painted the same color: black.  I wanted the eyes to be a solid black.  There are no pupils, just a deep soulless eye, something like a shark's eye.  When they came out of the oven, one pair was black, and the other two pair came out with one black eye and one eye that looked silver.  Unfortunately, these decorator marbles are not very consistent when it comes to size.  I had picked out each set of marbles so they would match in size.  I painted some more eyes, and the same thing happened, but since I had made several of them I was able to mix and match.  I have no explanation as to why some of the eyes changed color.  I would guess that it has something to do with how the light is refracting through them.  

Anyway, with enough eyes in hand I began to mount the eyes.  This is a retrofit project.  If I had been doing this project from scratch I would have done it differently.  When I made the faces, I molded strip paper mâché over a plastic skull.  When I had enough layers on, I cut the head off the skull mold, then put it back together using more layers of paper mâché.  (While I had them apart, I also made some modifications to the skulls.  See earlier posts for details on how I made the modifications and how I put the skulls back together.)  Rather than take the whole head apart again, I used the holes I had carved into the face to place the eyes.  If I had started from scratch, I would have painted the inside, and mounted the eyes and teeth while I had the head apart.

While the eyes and mouth were open, I painted the interior black.  It would actually have been better to mount the eyes before I painted the inside,  but then I would not have had the eye holes open to use for painting.  I would have preferred to glue the card stock directly to the paper mâché, but since I was also adding paper clay, I was not too worried about the stability of the mounting.  I once saw a tutorial on the internet in which the person reminded everyone that to glue pieces together before painting because your glue job was only as sturdy as your last coat of paint.

I mounted some black card stock to the underside of the holes for the eyes with hot glue.  This was the backing to hold the eyes in place.  The glass eyes were hot glued to the backing.  Paper clay was pressed around the eyes and underneath the lids to fill in the eyes.  It was a difficult job trying to mount the eyes while slipping my fingers in through the mouth hole.  I would swear that those creatures were biting me.  Sometimes it was difficult to get my fingers out.

Once the eyes were mounted I turned my attention to the mouth.  When you cut into a strip paper mâché piece, you can see the layers of paper.  I used a small dental pick type tool to push a hole in between layers and separated some layers slightly.  I twisted a very thin wire tightly at the top, and then left an opening in the middle of the wire, then twisted tightly again at the bottom.  I pressed the wire into small bits of paper clay and formed a tooth.  The opening in the middle of the wire would lock into the clay to hold the tooth in place and keep it from slipping once the tooth was dry.  When the tooth was formed, I put some multi-purpose glue in between the layers of the paper mâché and also added some glue along the gum line.  I stuck the bottom end of the wire into the hole I had made and pressed the layers of paper mâché back together.  That "rooted" the tooth.  The glue along the gum line also helped to keep the tooth in place.

I found that making the paper clay teeth sharp while trying to put them in place was too difficult.  You can do one or the other but not both.  I shaped them as best I could, and waited for them to dry.  The teeth were sharpened using small needle files.  I suppose if I had thought about it a bit further, I could have made the teeth and painted them before mounting them.  However, I am not sure I would have made them so that they would look right for a particular mouth if I had pre-made the teeth.  I did what I did, and now I am ready to go on to the painting.

I am excited to see how these heads are going to turn out.