Okay, the first thing we have to do is just kind of carefully sketch out the shape this mask is going to be, okay. So basically what I’m doing here is just drawing kind of a face and we’re going to want to cut a way straight down, okay. You don’t want to cut in because you don’t want to under cut the mask.
Couple of warnings, this stuff can be—it’s like a really fine material and just be careful that you don’t touch your face, you know while you’re working because you don’t to accidentally get this stuff in your eyes. And all I’m doing here is just kind of shaving off with my little plastic knife. We’re not going to get hurt doing any of these because we’re not using knives or anything like that, and all we’re trying to do here is just get the basic shape of the face. So we have what the head first.
Now one thing you need to remember about carving is that you always want to start out doing less than what you think can need to because once it’s gone, it’s gone, you can’t glue it back on, okay. So it’s better to not carve away enough than to carve away too much.
Okay now, this doesn’t have to be realistic, remember false face got his face mashed up against the side of the mountain. So you know, he’s going to look a little distorted and you know, you can make oversized noses and funny lips and wrinkles in the forehead and anything that you can come up with. Okay, now you’ll notice I’m just kind of smoothing the edges around the sides and just kind of rounding out the mask a little bit more.
When you’re doing carving, you have to think of the highest point on your mask which is probably going to be the nose because that’s the part that sticks out the furthest, okay. So what you literally have to do is you have to push down on either side of the nose, you’re digging down, okay. So what I tell my students is that you want to start by digging down because you’re trying to push down. The forehead is going to be a little bit lower than the nose. So the nose is this very top surface here, this plane, okay. And then you’re going to have the opportunity to dig down, and even dig down on the forehead.
Now I stopped right about here so my eyes can fit approximately in this part here, okay. And this is just kind of our rough draft so to speak, okay. Now I’m going to start to push the cheeks down a little bit. You see all we’re doing is just kind of roughing it in and the toothpick is going to be for the details like when you start to round off the edges of the nose or however you’re going to make the nose but we have to go pretty deep to make this nose big so we’re just getting started on digging this down but I don’t want to dig away too much of these because I want the mouth, I want to have room for mouth too.
It’s as if you are digging the faces in here and you’re digging away the foam to expose the face that’s under there, and that’s the way Michelangelo said that he worked, that he knew there was a figure inside the big black marble, and all he did was chisel away out it to release the image. So it’s kind of what we’re doing here.
And you know they are really isn’t one right way to do this, I mean, you know, if you don’t get it exactly the way you see me doing it, it doesn’t matter.
Now be real careful when you’re gently tapping this that you don’t hit it real hard because the delicate features you just made could easily get broken off.
So now I’m going to need to get some kind of designs in his forehead so I think I’m going to use a popsicle stick and then I use the toothpick at an angle and then I’m going to use it an angle this way because the carved out areas, it’s almost like a V—one side comes down in an angle, the other side comes at an angle and then here’s the surface.
If you were an Iroquois Indian, you live in a village and you got sick, you would go to one of the medicine man in the village and if they felt they couldn’t help you, they would call in one of the members of the False Face Society and they would then do their ritual ceremony and try and heal you. Now once you’ve been healed by someone in the False Face Society, you yourself become a member and it’s said that then this person, you know, has the dream and they go out into the woods and they pick a basswood tree and then they carve their vision into the tree.
Now there’s one last thing you can do if you want, you don’t have to but you can actually carve a little bit of the back out so you know, it looks more like a mask so if you wanted too, you would basically go around like this and you would start to dig this out but you got to be careful that you don’t take too far because you know, you could literally pop through the face.
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