Made by Kirsten Fitzgerald
The pattern was perfect & looked great!!
We had only a few weeks to paint 11 lion masks and then figure out how to make 2 Giraffe necks & heads for the students to wear for a high school production of The Lion King, Jr..
We enlarged the pattern by 200% & ended up adjusting the neck so it was thinner & was straight instead of tapering at the bottom.
One giraffe head was made from cereal box cardboard & the other from poster board. Masking tape was used on the outside of both the heads & necks. Duct tape was used on the inside of the necks for stability. (Extra cardboard braces were also made & used on the inside of the heads.)
For the eyes, we used fake lemons (Dollar Tree) cut in half then hot glued in place & taped criss cross on the back side of the eye.
We DID NOT paper mache them, but just sprayed the cardboard with a white primer/paint, then painted with acrylic paints to match the costumes they had made.
Giraffes have SO MANY spots!!!! ?
The students wore them with a helmet and a metal rod wrapped in brown tape & attached the back of the neck which went down the students back & sat in their mike pack.
They look fantastic, Kirsten! Thanks for letting us see how nice they came out, without using any paper mache. The costumes are wonderful, too. The actors must have had a lot of fun – it’s an experience I’m sure they’ll remember for a long time. 🙂
This is brilliant! I Thank you for making this pattern! I don’t know what I would have done without this. I have 3 days to make a mask for my son’s high school battle of the classes parade. I’m not sure how I am going to attach it to his head since his face cannot be showing. Any ideas?
That is going to be tricky, but you might be able to make an additional cardboard piece to go on the bottom of the neck. Make it large enough to go all the way around his head. You might have to do some fiddling to make it fit with the neck pieces. If you put eye holes in front, and make a rounded bottom edge so it sits comfortably on his shoulders, it might work. The only other option I can think of is to tape the bottom of the neck on top of a bicycle helmet, like this one, and use a piece of painted cloth to come down over the helmet and the face, with eye holes added. That might actually be easier. Have fun with it! 🙂