Years ago the kids and I experimented with using modeling clay on a Styrofoam head to make a weirdly inhuman mask shapes.  They took forever to dry and the modelling clay was hard to pry out from the paper mask.  We painted them but they ended up just sitting around for years gathering dust, never quite finished.

I decided to revisit the masks this month and giving them an all new paint job, adding materials to them and creating glass eyes.

My first mask redo was a cat like mask with a ridge of bumps up the centre of it's face. Once painted, I added wool to create a mane and painted glass beads as eyes which I then mounted in behind the mask.  It looked even better when I lit the mask from within making the eyes light up.

My next mask was a tad weirder.  My daughter had originally made the shape by adding modelling clay to the mouth area before papering over top.  It had a strange gas mask-like appearance.  I ran with this idea but added bits of black spray painted plastic I melted with a match, small glass vials filled with different materials, a pair of glasses and again glass eyes lit form behind.

I love how it turned out even if it's a bit creepy.

I've often used glass floral beads to make eyes for various clay or sculpture projects but never for a photography project. 

I found some large glass beads at our local dollar store and then painted up a few sets of eyes in different colours and styles (mammalian or reptilian).  Then while out on a hike with my family we went looking for unique features in the forest where we could place a set of eyes and give nature a face.

It became a really fun outing, hiking and seeing some beautiful landscapes while also searching out the finer details that could be given nature a face. I think we'll keep a set of eyes in our camping supplies so that we can do this again on our next hike.

Have you watched Avatar the Last Airbender? It was one of my families favorite shows when my kids were younger (and remains one of their top shows ever). It had fantastic character development and a good balance of adventure, humor and moral dilemmas.  

The biggest problem with the show was lack of merchandise.  This might be because we came to watch the show after its full run so we missed out on that.

Since I love to sew and my kids love to play imagination style games I decided to make the characters out of felt.  I didn't really have an idea of how to make them so the process was slow but they turned out pretty good.  These photos were taken after a few years of play hence the pilling and deformity (sorry Toph).  I wish I had documented how I constructed these in case other fans wanted to attempt to make their own.