The Four-Hour Mask

I'm heading over to work in a friend's yard haunt tonight and I realized that I didn't want to do a full face makeup, as I'll only be there for the last hour of his trick-or-treat. So I quickly decided that a mask was in order for the evening's quick festivities. The only problem is that I don't have a mask that I could bring.

So I got creative.

I rummaged through all of my Halloween bins and found one of those old, clear plastic face masks with the elastic band. You know, the kind that the old bank robbers always used to wear...

I then ran down to the basement to see what paints I had available to improve on the mask. I pulled a can of off-white spray paint and covered the entire mask in one coat. As the paint dried, I came up with the idea of making it look like a broken porcelain face. And although it had been done many times over, I didn't want to have the traditional feminine doll face. 

When the paint was dry to the touch, I took a Sharpie permanent marker with a nice, sharp point and started drawing the cracks. I wanted to focus the area of damage to the right eye, cheek and forehead, as the old mask already had a real crack in that area around the eye. After the cracks were drawn, I quickly added a wash of watered-down black paint to grunge it up a bit...

All told, this took roughly four hours of time and will work perfectly for tonight's haunt. It is something that I whipped out quickly and will be easy to put on and take off (especially in those slow times, where a cold beverage is in order!). And furthermore, I can put this in my extra costume bin for Halloween night, in case any of my actors need a quick mask.

Good luck to everyone who is putting on their yard haunt displays tonight! I have until Friday, so it's back to the garage for me. I have one final push before the big night and I'm going to see how much I can get done by then.