Now, I think what I’m going to do is just kind of cut this out and use this as a template. cut out one and then trace around the other one and you’ll notice I just add a little extra to him so that there’s extra card board to actually glue into the pulp mask. Cardboard is not easy thing to cut out. There we go so this is going to get hot glued right like that okay I’ve just finish up hot gluing are additions on to the actual mask and now we have a form that we can actually start working on. You’re going to want to get a variety of different kinds of beans. There’s all different shapes, sizes, colors so we’re going to be working in the idea of texture and color. You want to be certain that if you use one particular tight of bean somewhere top of the mask for balance you want to use repeated somewhere else on another side of the mask. In some areas of Africa, they make a lot of bead of mask versus bean to masks and they actually would trade the different kinds of beads that they would use.
Beads are also a symbol of wealth to a lot of African tribes if you’ve got lots of different kind’s beads that mean that that you have some wealth to a display to the other members in the tribe. I think I’m going to start with some of these red beans here. I’ve got my polymer medium and it’s nice and thick and what you want to do if you’re starting on a side of the mask you want always start at the bottom because the road beads that you put along the bottom are going kind of service of buffer to keep the other beads there going to if they start to slide down the side there going to stop by the row among the bottoms so it’s pretty easy once you get the hang of it goes pretty quickly. You don’t have to worry about the 2:33, it dries clear and you just place your bottom row. I’m just going to fill in this area which is all going to be red.
Now, you’ve got some artistic choices to make here. You can lay them sideways. You could have done them vertically. I just do them horizontally. You could turn them on their side because you have a little white dot there and would introduce another design element so you’ve got a lot of things you need to look at when you start choosing. It’s almost like choosing a color paint, the style the way you’re going to apply the paint those kinds of decisions you need to make. Just because their beings, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t some artistic choices to make as far as color and placement and you just polymer down and then you lay the beans down.
You know, you’ve got the idea her. You’re going to keep filing in with different areas and choosing your colors and deciding which direction you want your beans to lay. If you’ve got like a little—the split peas, they come in green and they also come in kind of a yellow. You can lay them faced down so that you know, the rounded part of the bean is facing you or you could glue them down so that the split part is face up.
So you’ve got lots of decisions to make. When you get the whole mask covered and you’ve covered your additional pieces that you’ve added with cardboard. After everything is dry, you’re going to want t take some of your polymer medium and your just going to paint a thing coati8ng over all of the beans. This will dry clear just like you see over here and then we’ll give it a nice overall gloss to it.
The raffia comes in lots of different colors and if you wanted to add raffia to this project, what you do is you just unroll a section of it and let’s say you want some kind of whisker type thing. I would just take this and tie it and a big knot and then your going to fold it in half like this and you an give it a haircut and then you just take your hot glue gun. Let’s say, you wanted something at the top here. We could just hot glue this to the back like there and there you’ve got some raffia added. You could use tight cleaners. You could use pieces of wire, if you wanted to do whiskers and the possibilities are their out there. It just depends how creative you are and what you want to make so, you’ve got lots of beans, you’ve got raffia, you’ve got your polymer medium and this is a great masking project that is inspired by African masks.
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