Homemade Painted Zombie Mask
The horror culture surrounding zombies has remained a favorite for decades, making zombie costumes a continued favorite choice for Halloween or costume play. While you can create some good zombie effects using makeup and small prosthetics, for a truly horrifying rotting-flesh zombie face, you need a full head mask. While a good zombie head mask is as gruesome as it is impressive, building your own from liquid latex and paint is not as difficult as you might think. A few tried-and-true makeup and latex techniques will help you create a mask that will make viewers shriek with disgusted delight.
Things You'll Need
- Styrofoam wig manikin
- Kitchen plastic wrap
- Liquid latex
- Disposable foam brushes
- Paper towel
- Novelty costume rubber teeth
- Scissors
- Acrylic paint
- Thick stage blood
Instructions
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Wrap the Styrofoam manikin tightly in plastic kitchen wrap, taping it in place to ensure that it doesn't slide around. Add at least two layers, but add more if the head shape is rather smaller than your own, to get it up to the right thickness.
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Cover the head in a few base layers of liquid latex using a disposable brush. Apply in fewer, thicker layers if you want the finished skin to look lumpy, as if it's in deep rot. Use more, thinner layers if you want the skin to conform to the shape of the head and look fresher. Apply new layers only after the last has fully dried (about 20 minutes to an hour, depending on the latex formula), and apply enough to make the latex about a quarter inch thick.
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Refine the features. Make a paste of finely shredded paper towel mixed with liquid latex and use it to give the mask features, sculpting directly over the previous layers as if with clay. Form ears, nose and mouth, making them as misshapen and twisted as you want them to be--there's a lot of margin for error in this kind of gruesome project, even if you aren't a great sculptor. Lay down soaked towel strips in lines to create the experience of exposed muscle tissue, if you like.
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Give the mask teeth. After the previous layers of latex are dry enough to remove the mask from the head, cut away the latex at the mouth area. Insert the rubber fake teeth into this hole, then seal them in place with more liquid latex (apply like glue) and pieces of latex-soaked paper towel. Paint a thin coat of latex over the entire set of teeth to make their color and texture consistent with the rest of the mask once dry.
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Cover the mask with a base coat of corpse-flesh color. For mild decomposition, mix a regular flesh-tone shade with white (three parts flesh tone to one part white), then add ½ part gray. For more severe decomposition, do the same, but add a little more white and equal parts gray and green (experiment with these ratios to find what you like best).
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Paint the crevices of the mask with blood and black paint. Work black paint into the crevices and cracks of the mask and let dry, then fill the most torn and uneven areas with thick stage blood.
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Create rotting corpse dimension with paint. Paint black circles around the eyes, nose and inside any jowl and wrinkle lines and inside and around the mouth.
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References
- "The Monster Makers Mask Makers Handbook" by Arnold Goldman; 1995
