Barbara Maitland

Note: This is a continuation of the Beetlejuice masks of Adam and Barbara Maitland which I started in the previous post.

For the Barbara mask, I used a dummy head to sculpt on top of.  In the movie Beetlejuice, Barbara contorts  her face by stretching her upper and lower mandible outward, making her mouth look like a gigantic beak with teeth.  In order to successfully sculpt this shape, I needed to use a wire armature as a support structure, and sculpt around it.

For this project I used Amaco Permoplast oil based modeling clay.  Something I forgot to mention in prior posts is that I use a dedicated toaster oven to warm up and soften the clay to speed up my sculpting time.  Since the modeling clay comes in blocks, I cut them into workable pieces using a drywall knife and gradually heat up small amounts of clay at a time.  This makes the rough out stage go by much faster.  I filled in the negative spaces and began roughing out the general shape of the head.  Similarly to Adam, the Barbara sculpt wasn't very challenging.    Once the desired general shape of the sculpture was achieved, I began sculpting all the details.  

The mold process was tedious, to say the least.  I made a four part mold using Ultracal 30 and a lot of patience.  I also molded the tongue separately. 

It wasn't perfect but it would do the job effectively. After I pried the mold apart and cleaned any clay that had stuck to the crevices, it was ready to be cast out of liquid latex and polyfoam.  Once the mask dried and was ready to come out of the mold, I noticed the seams weren't great and the mask had mold lines everywhere.  I tried my best to repair these, but some of them were just to big and noticeable.  I sewed some together and patched others with latex to make them less apparent.  Then I painted the mask using Liquitex acrylics mixed with a Polycrylic protective coat. 

The eyeballs were made out of ping pong balls that were painted and glossed with 5min drying two-part epoxy resin.  I also cut a hole in the back of the throat for visibility which I hot glued a black screen to.  Then I hot glued a store bought wig I got from a local Halloween shop that looked similar to Gena Davis hair in the film.  And there you have it!