Devil Woman

Well, I am feeling a temendous sense of accomplishment today because I finally finished cleaning up and reorganizing my art closet. I had to make some new boxes to store the mask making supplies and had to clean up so I would have a place to put them. I absolutely love my craft closet. Originally it was actually a linen cabinet and a coat closet that was too shallow for hangers in the hallway leading to the bedrooms. When Jim and I redid that area of the house we decided to combine the two into one big shallow closet with double doors and it seemed to be the perfect place to store all the arts and craft supplies.

We decided to use the same shelving system from Lowes but this time with wooden shelves since the boxes were much heavier and we didn't want things falling through wire shelves. We got the boxes from the container store and then used them to set up where we would put the shelves so that we could have them fit perfectly. It is a dream to go and just pull out the whole box of supplies for whatever I am working on. I just have to remember to put it back.

Today's craft project was actually finishing a pair of horns that I started as an experiment when I was making the prototype mask for the Tempest. I had a couple of little scrap triangles of the 2 oz leather and so I quickly dampened them with some water, curled them in to a cone shape and glued them together with ModPodge just to see what would happen. After they looked like the would stay together I gave them a little bit of a curve by pinching them with my fingers and then dried them in the oven. 

So today to finish them off, first I trimmed the open ends of the horns off flat and even so they wouldn't irritate me against my face. Then, I took them in the mirror and figured out where they should be on my head. Next, I used a magic marker to make small horizontal dots where I was going to punch hole to put a string to hold them on to my head.

I then used a leather punch on the smallest setting to punch two opposing holes in each horn and strung them on clear 1.8 mm elastic (used for beading.) I tied a knot around the elastic so it would fit on my head. I used vinyl spackle to fill in the crack that was left over from rolling them into a cone so that they would have a nice even surface and let hat dry for about an hour while I went out to an appointment.

After they had dried I gave them a coat of ModPodge for extra stiffness and let that dry while I took a short rest.

Then I got out my acrylic paints and painted them to have a nice variegated surface. I wanted to keep the kind of fleshy leather color at the bottom so that it would look like they grew out of my skin. I started with a base color that was a flesh color with a little bit of champagne gold for sparkle. I then built up some lights and darks with a dark copper brown and a light pearl white. I then tinted the ends of the horns a bit redder with a wash of metallic red. The finishing coat is a thin coat of pearl white which I put on with a brush and then blend in with my fingers to make a smooth texture without brushmarks. This helps to blend together all the shading into a seamless texture. This picture shows one horn finished and one with just the base coat.Violà. Devil Woman.