To fill the other empty space on the wall by the window, I took inspiration from photos of Osteria Al Vecchio Stallo’s interior, where they have a couple of Venetian masks on their walls, and decided to make a Venetian mask out of polymer clay. I’ve always been drawn to the masks and costumes of Carnevale and have a small collection of masks from my many trips to Venezia over the years.
This has been my most difficult project so far. As my sculpting skills are rather lacking, I started by buying the “small faces” mold by Best Flexible Molds, but what I naively didn’t take into account was the fact that I would need to cut out eye holes. The molds are designed to be used for making cabochons, where the mold is filled with clay and sliced flat on the back. My vision was instead to line the mold with a sheet of clay so that it would be concave on the inside like a real mask, which would also allow me to cut out the eyes. However, this was much, much more problematic than I had anticipated.
The first issue was removing the clay from the mold without distorting it. Putting it in the fridge helped somewhat, but the nose always ended up squashed. I was using Premo white; however, a test mask I made using Premo black didn’t have this problem. Thinking that my white clay was perhaps softer than the black and that a firmer clay would hold its shape better, I tried using white Kato Polyclay. Unfortunately, the raw Kato kept cracking, no matter how well I conditioned it. So back to Premo…
Even when making a cabochon from the mold, the features weren’t ideal: the nose was rather flat and the mouth was too wide and broad. These were not the features I was looking for, so I decided to try my hand at resculpting the face, using some scrap clay and with the mold as a starting point. My first results were pretty pathetic (my husband called them “derpy-looking”), with duck lips and a pronounced overbite. But after about five tries, I felt I had a decent face.
My plan was to make a silicone mold of this face using Amazing Mold Putty and then use that to make the mask. However, the resulting mold was so flexible (even more so than the Best Flexible Mold) that it was impossible not to squash the nose when unmolding it. By packing more putty around the outside of the mold to stiffen it and again putting it in the fridge, I was able to unmold the mask fairly well, though the nose did need a little refining.
Cutting the eye holes proved to be just as difficult a challenge, because the pressure of the knife would inevitably squash the face. At first, I tried placing the mask over a large ball tool while cutting, but the shape was wrong and tended to stretch the face too wide, making it hard to gauge the shape of the eyes. My solution was to make a reverse mold of the inside of the mask. After baking, this would provide the proper form to rest the mask on (using cornstarch so the raw mask wouldn’t stick to the form underneath).
Once I had this system down, I still found cutting out the eyes to be tremendously difficult. I would usually get one good eye, but making them even was nearly hopeless. I tried several different shapes, preferring a nice almond shape, although I completely failed at that one. While not my favorite shape, the one I found the easiest to work with was a teardrop, using a round micro cutter for the inner eye and cutting the point with my knife. Even so, it was hard to get the angle of the knife even, given the thickness of the clay. I made close to two dozen masks before finally getting one that I felt was usable.
Initially, I had no clear vision for the mask’s design, although I was certain I wanted to use Pearl Ex mica powders. I used all my reject masks to test designs and eventually settled on the Harlequin style. However, I wasn’t happy with any of the Pearl Ex colors. Though they’re all gorgeous colors, I found that I really wanted to use red, and Pearl Ex doesn’t make a good red (the russet colors do look reddish on black clay but come out orange on white clay).
So I ordered two different red colors by Perfect Pearls. One was actually a nice red color, but it didn’t have the beautiful sheen that Pearl Ex has and was also really grainy. That’s when I switched gears entirely and brought out my acrylic paints. Whereas I was applying the mica powders to the clay while it was still raw, it seemed better to bake the masks before painting. This allowed me to pencil in the diamond pattern first. I used red, white, and black acrylic paint, but since my only gold paint was very yellow in hue, I went with gold alcohol ink for the gold sections. I mixed some dark brown into my yellowish gold paint to get the right shade for the lines.
As a varnish, I tried out my PYMII spray sealer, one of only a couple spray sealers compatible with polymer clay. (The brand has been discontinued, but I was lucky to snag a can on eBay as soon as I heard of its demise. I had no immediate plans to use it but had a feeling it would come in handy someday!)
To make the wire bail for hanging on the wall, I bent some silver wire and embedded it in some white clay on the back before baking one last time.
Now that I have all the wall decor elements finished, I am finally ready to start hanging everything on the walls…
