Onyx's Head


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After the muscle suit was done, I started in on the head. This was the first suit since Brooklyn that had a beak, as opposed to a muzzle. This is important; a beak is not covered by fur, so bumps and seams and flaws from construction are much harder to hide. Still, experience with the commissions had shown how to go about it without having it weigh too much.

I tried hard to take a lot of pictures of this construction. As such, I broke it down even within this page into specific parts that focus on the eyes and horns. You can go straight there by clicking on the links below, or see them in order by just continuing down the page. And of course, you can click on the pictures to get a larger view.

Horn Construction Eye Construction


This is the helmet construct that the whole head is built on. The picture on the upper left is the whole thing riveted together but not yet folded. The others are different views of the thing once it has been permanently bent by using a paint-stripping gun to heat the plastic. That plastic, by the way, is ABS, good tough stuff.

These pictures are actually a little misleading. The first time I tried to build the head by bolting everything together and then bending it, but I found that didn't work. Making the pieces fold so they fit together properly made it just not fit my head. I had to drill the rivets out and re-cut a few of the pieces. Then I molded the curves of my head around my brow and from front to back by using bent pieces of a wire clothes hanger. Afterwards I just bent the pieces until they matched those curvatures, and then bolted it together. It's still a little tight around my forehead (I tried to take the foam padding into account when I made the curves, but didn't quite succeed), but at least it's wearable, unlike the first one.

Since the long central strip was actually curved to be tighter then the curvature over my head, I have to stretch the plastic to fit it over my skull. You can see it in the difference between the pictures on the upper right and lower left. This makes it clamp nicely to my head, preventing easy slippage like my previous costumes sometimes suffer from.


This is the beak. The upper beak, to be specific, but since I'm going to call the lower beak the jaw I'm just going to call this the beak. In the upper left is, again, the pattern cut out of a flat plastic sheet of ABS. Coming up with this pattern took literally hours of trial and error with paper and cardboard; the main spot of trouble was the front of the beak. The curvature there is complicated, and small changes made to the flat pattern can dramatically alter what the tip looks like.

The other pictures show the beak after I heated and bent it lengthwise down the center. As you can see, despite all those hours the tip still didn't quite come out right. I had planned to use some material to patch the seam between the two sides of the beak anyway, but now it became absolutely necessary lest there be a great gash front and center.


And here is the beak, with all its bends and folds and attached to the helmet. Also, its tip has been fixed. The greyish stuff is called Magic Sculpt, and is the same material that I used for Brooklyn's beak. However, I was much, much more careful this time. I know how much this stuff can weigh, now! It added about a third of a pound to the beak, though I will admit it's all concentrated at the tip. Still, it seems to have been a small enough portion; the mask shows no tendancy to dip forward.

I did, unfortunately, neglect to take photos of the beak with the Magic Sculpt on but still unsanded. I added much more than what you see here, in hopes of filling in minor dips in the plastic that came about from the bending process. A few remain, but by and large it was a success. After it was on and smoothed into the curvature of the rest of the beak I added a double layer of floor varnish to help protect the plastic from getting chipped or scratched.


This is the aforementioned jaw. As you can see in the first picture, the pattern is very similar to that of the beak. (The pattern is a different color because it was made from needlepoint fabric, and I neglected to take a photo of the actual jaw before I started bending it.) The two pseudopods on the left are what hinges against the helmet.

This pattern is both easier and harder than the beak's. On the one hand, it is simpler, and without the middle piece that goes between the eyes it is much easier to bend. On the other hand, it must be shaped and bent very precisely, or it won't match up well with the beak. I daresay I did a pretty good job, although once again the tip didn't come together quite as it should have.


Here's the tip, after correction. I remembered this time to take a few pictures of the Magic Sculpt before I sanded it. Well, these are they.

As you can see, there's an awful lot more stuff on there than there needs to be. It ain't pretty. And it's not quite simple to put on, since in the areas with no support - in the gap I am trying to plug, for instance - it tended to move around with each new blob I put on. It would not have been too big a deal, but it would have meant a lot of extra sanding to thin it down again. So I used another piece of needlepoint fabric to stiffen it up a little. The same piece also helped guide me for building up the tip to approximately the shape I was after.


And here is the jaw with the stuff sanded down. Lots, lots less weight on the tip now, and the little imperfections in folding are mostly smoothed out.

The Magic Sculpt that is further back on the beak, closer to the hinges, is there to hide the tongue bolts. You heard me, tongue bolts. It's not a costume tongue, I'm afraid; I wasn't even sure at this point whether Onyx would have much in the way of structure inside the mouth. No, this tongue goes underneath my chin and is what translates my jaw movement to the costume's. This is bolted to beak or muzzle; normally the underside is obscured by fur. But as I already mentioned, there is no fur on Onyx, and a simple layer of paint would still leave the bolts very visible. Hence, this little addition.

Naturally, I covered it with a double layer of protective varnish, just as I had the upper beak.


This is the tongue I just mentioned. As you can see, it sticks out the back, not the front. That is, after all, where my face is. You can also see that it has two positions. On the left is how it is when I am not wearing the costume; with the tongue inside the beak, I can get my face through the hole there with ease. Once it's slid out, as it is on the right, it fits nicely under my chin.


No progress on these photos, just a couple of pics of the jaw attached to the head. Although both the beak and the jaw are slightly crooked, I honestly think it's slight enough that, with the skin on to hide the incorrect angles, people won't notice. Except on this page, of course, where I actually pointed it out.


At this point, I started working on the horns. The first thing I did, and unfortunately neglegted to photograph, is take another piece of plastic, heat-bend it to match the head's curvature, and rivet it to the helmet above the brow. I then drilled a 1/4" hole in it. This is the socket for the model horn I would build directly onto the helmet itself.

I bent a piece of delrin rod to curve approximately as I desired the horn to, and fit one end into the hole. I then started building up plastelina around it, roughly in the size and shape of the horn-to-be. I wasn't going for precision, at this point, just something to work with.


With the delrin covered, I began slicing off excess plastelina. I'd put it on in a kind of bent triangular cylinder - equal size all the way to the top - and now had to make it tapered. It wasn't hard, though making the taper even along its entire length, and keeping the sides roughly the same width all the way down as well, was tricky.


With the taper complete, it was time to add the ridges. I did this by making plastelina "snakes" and sticking them on the horn at intervals and then smoothing them down into triangular ridges that went all the way around. This was, again, simple to do, yet tricky to do right, especially where snakes from two different sides met together, on the edges. It added a lot more mass than I expected, too.

You can also see just how messy my workspace was. Neatnik, I am not.


Here you can see the completed horn (and a new, larger, slightly neater workspace). If you look carefully, you'll notice the ridges aren't put on with perfectly shortening intervals. They're also not put up perfectly straight. Neither was intentional, but neither was major enough of a flaw for me to take the horn apart even partially and try again. I decided I'd just have to live with it, perhaps even try to mirror it in the other horn. Nature isn't perfect, after all.


Time to make a mold. The first step was to build a mold form. Since silicone molding goop is costly, it's a good idea to make it as close to the shape of the form you're casting as possible; you don't want to just fill a big huge box with goop. So I used a big huge box, covered it with seran wrap to contain leaks, then cut up another box to make the actual form from. I lined that with seran wrap too, and covered the plastic with vaseline to act as mold release.

The best way to do a mold, I was told, is to take the original and stick a layer of clay around half of it, and then pour the silicone. You mold it in two halves, seperately. I couldn't surropund the original I'd made of the horn with clay, though, since that's essentially what plastelina is, so I used celluclay. Made a batch of that to the consistency of oatmeal and stuck the horn in it lengthways, doing my best to cover only half. I added a few wooden pegs around the perimiter to provide alignment aids later, and it was ready to receive goop.

The second picture, on the right, is just me mixing up a batch of the stuff.


These are pictures of the first half of the molding. To the left is how it appeared after I poured the silicone. It's not all that exciting, just a flat surface.

To the right are the results, with the silicone set and flipped over to reveal the half of the horn that was covered by celluclay. I'd actually added a thin layer of more silicone afterwards, to even out the surface. As it was, the celluclay left an impression of, well, oatmeal. It was also uneven. But as you can see, some silicone of that second pouring got above the horn's tip, and had to be cut away so that molding would be part of the second half. If I hadn't done that, the model would have been difficult to remove without damaging the mold badly.


Here's the results of the second pouring: two complete halfs of a mold. To make sure they were seperate, I'd coated the first half with more vaseline. It worked quite well, and I'm sure that if the mold form hadn't broken, spilling silicone down the sides, then I wouldn't have had to use a blade much at all to get the halves apart.


I then took the original out and pressed the two halves together again, using the molds I'd made of the wooden dowels to get them placed properly in respect to each other. Here you can see them together, along with my efforts to prevent leaks around the seam: more seran wrap, and duct tape.

Unfortunately, it didn't work.

After a bit of thought, I came up with a solution: I made another small batch of goop and painted it, by hand with a paintbrush, on the area of contact between the layers. Then I pressed the two halves together again and let the new silicone set. That worked. There were no leaks, though I found I'd spread it either too thick or too close to the inner hollow that I was to fill (or both). The casting came out with some inclusions that couldn't have come from anything except goop squeezed inwards from the seam.


And here are the results. As you can see, and as I mentioned earlier, it wasn't perfect. There were inclusions from goop leaking into the casting area, bumps and ridges from air bubbles in the mold getting filled by casting goop, and the very front was entirely absent thanks to the Quik Cast being a little too quick, and the stuff solidified in the funnel. But I got the entire length, so although it needed some work it was an acceptable result.


I had initially intended that the horn would have a trio of plugs to attach it to the head. But these plugs didn't really get cast well; the angle I'd had to keep the mold at trapped some air at the ends, and so they came out only half-formed. They weren't long enough to secure at the ends with cotter pins, as I'd planned. So I cut them entirely off and drilled holes in the base of the horn, then set some acryllic rods into them. I secured the rods with more Magic Sculpt. Once it was set, I drilled holes for the pins, which you can see in the second picture, keeping the horn from falling off the head. The horn, plugs, and pins are all strong enough, as is the helmet, for me to lift the head by the horns, or even a single horn.


And here is the horn, essentially complete. As you can see, there was a lot of Magic Sculpt added, though in some places it is only a thin layer to help get precisely the shape I desired. In other places, like the area that curves into the forehead, it's pretty much solid. Adding it on and sanding it down was a tedious but hardly difficult task.


Here is a picture of the head with both horns attached. The observant viewer will notice that the horn here doesn't really look like the horn in the pictures devoted to horn construction. This is because when I made the second horn, the left one, it didn't really match the first horn. It was a different length, a different curvature, and the ridges were differently spaced. They were similar but hardly a match. But I liked the second horn better, and so chose to redo the first one. And about halfway through my third horn, I decided to cut it short. A broken horn ended that little trial, and also adds a little character.

If you look closely, you'll also see some wires on the mask's forehead. They're part of the electronics, which I didn't really document going in. The circuit is really simple, though, as you can see from my little diagram. There are two fans in the muzzle, both pushing air outwards. I needed two because the first one, when installed, ended up above my mouth, which was fine, but below my nose. So breathing through my nose would make moisure really build up, which would fog the eyes. Unlike previous masks, I included an actual switch instead of relying on hooking and unhooking the batteries to turn the fan on and off. The switch is below the left horn (the horn on the right,in the picture) and through a small hole can be turned on and off with a toothpick. And a little patience, perhaps - I may enlarge the hole a little later.


Then I started on the eyes. This was a relatively simple affair. There's no animatronics, and they don't even light up. The main problems, as usual, were in making the irises and finding a plastic sphere to fit the mask.

I tackled the second problem first. In my masks up to this point, I had avoided acrylic plastic spheres - it had been practically beaten into me by Legend that acrylic is too brittle to use in something like this. But it was getting difficult to find unblemished clear lexan hollow spheres of the right size, so I shrugged and headed to the local hobby shop. I found acrylic spheres and eggs of several sizes for cheap enough that I bought several sizes because I didn't know which would work best, and several packages of the most likely sizes so I could afford to experiment and make mistakes. They're also more than sturdy enough to serve as eyes.

It turned out that egg-shaped worked best. I put tape on the outside and used it as a drawing surface, then traced the outline of the eye socket in the mask on the tape. I cut away the excess plastic, and I had my cornea.


The rest of it was made much like previous eyes. I found a fry screen mesh at the local supermarket, painted it yellow (later changed to a more orange-ish yellow) and cut it out of the frame. These are the "whites" of the eyes. To see how much to cut from the mesh, I just pressed the back of the plastic cornea against it and traced the edge. A little experimentation showed that I actually would want these whites inside the cornea, but only on one side. If they folowed the angle of the plastic as it would be installed in the head, he would be permanently... what's the opposite of crosseyed? Well, whatever it's called, he would be it. I couldn't change the angle the plastic egg would be at - it had to be secured to the side, and so it had to be long enough to reach the edge of the socket. But by changing the angle of the whites and covering the plastic behind it, he would be more forward-looking.



I got the iris from a taxidermy website (Van Dyke's Taxidermy Supply, to be exact) and asked an online acquaintance modify the coloration. The picture on the left is the original, the other two his modifications. I didn't worry about the white reflection spot, as it was in the pupil.


I took the file to the local office supply store. The copy center there was able to print it out on transparency film. Unfortunately, a good deal of the fine detail in the coloration was obscured a bit, because the printing came out a bit darker than the file. It's still there, but you have to be pretty close to see it, and it doesn't photograph well.

The pupil was easy. First, of course, I carefully cut out the pupils in the transparency. Then I took some gray mylar, the kind that is used to tint car windows, cut it out a bit larger than the hole, and glued it to the back of the iris. The only difficult part was finding the right tint of mylar. Too dark and I wouldn't be able to see in a dim room, too light and it'd be easy to see my real eyes behind the mask. I seem to recall I ended up with a 35% transparency, but unfortunately I didn't actually record it, so I'll have to experiment again next time. Hopefully I keep better records, then, too.


This is just a closeup view of the eye sockets, into which the eyes will be installed. I had to reheat the plastic a bit in the center to accomodate the curve of the eye plastic, and I drilled holes for cable ties to be threaded through.


The final step, before installation, was not photographed. I cut a hole out of the whites to match the pupil - no sense in looking through a vision-obscuring grille when I didn't have to - and glued the iris and pupil to them. Once the glue was dry, I cable-tied the assembly to the cornea.

And so this is what Onyx looked like with the eyes installed. You can see in the picture on the right what I meant about angling the whites into the cornea to make him look forward more.


Then I had to shape the area around the eyes. Since I'd already made the actual eyes, I knew what I wanted obscured and what I wanted to leave clear. I covered the eyes and the horn sockets with tape, then proceeded to use spray insulation foam to build up the area around the eyes. It looks like he has some horrible disease, but it's quick and easy.

You might notice that between making the eyes and building up the area around them, I painted the beak. Once more, this was not photographed. it was fairly simple, though. A base coat of flat black paint, then I drybrushed irridescent blue and purple acrylics over it. Two coats of floor varnish over it all help prevent casual chips and scratches. The overall effect is a little more purple than I expected, but I like it.


This is the foam after a lot of work. I had to use a razor knife to make the large, coarse cuts that gave it its general shape, and a hand sander for the fine detail and smoothing. As in most things regarding Onyx's general morphology, I based the look on Brooklyn. Luckily, I had a good model to work from: my old Brooklyn mask.

One of the very nice things about using this technique is that, if there's a mistake, I can just spray more foam on, wait a couple of hours for it to set, and then I can carve again. I also found spray foam much easier to carve than that old standby of fursuiters everywhere, upholstry foam. Upholstry foam is soft, which means it won't break if you bump it against a wall or even sit on it. But because it's soft, it bends under carving instruments like scissors, knives, and even electric carving knives. Spray foam, once it sets, is like styrofoam. Easy to carve into the exact shape I wanted, without bending and distorting the cuts. Its reigidity does mean that sitting on it or hitting it hard will break it, but since the entire head is more rigid than a foam-carved head I don't see any added disadvantages.


Unfortunately, I discoverred that my eagerness to paint the beak worked against me. The spary foam bonds to surfaces tenaciously, and naturally some had to be carved away from parts of the beak I wanted clear. The end result was that the paint job at the back of the beak was ripped to shreds. I essentially had to repaint the entire beak - just doing the affected areas left a distinct edge.

So, as a little reminder, to myself if nobody else: do not paint until you're sure you won't be ripping things off of the paint job!


After a little more carving and shaping, it was time to get rid of the look of a skull. That means adding skin, and that means patterns. Since it is skin and not fur, I decided not to glue patches on, carefully matching the edges. Instead, I would sew the entire skin of the head together, and then slip it onto the skull like a hood.

The first step, then, was to find the paterns for the skin. I covered the front and top of Onyx's skull with masking tape, then used a Sharpie to note the edges I felt best. Suit makers need to remember that the fabric pieces, ideally, should lie perfectly flat when taken off the head, so a lot of these lines are on the areas that curve the most.


I then used knife and scissors to cut the tape away from the head, piece by piece, and stuck them to some newspaper. These are the patterns I derived from those lines. They didn't lie perfectly flat, which meant I could expect some wrinkles somewhere. The fabric was not stretchy enough to compensate. Short of making an insane number of patterns, though, with enough seams to make Onyx look like the victim of a knife fight, there was nothing I could do.


After the top and front, it was time for the rest. I flipped it upside-down and started taping again. The neck was tricky, since there was nothing to attach tape to. I solved that by inserting a spray paint can and few other things to make it reach the proper height, then suspending a collar made of Fun Foam from it like a chandelier. Then I just ran tape from the skull up to the collar.

There is a jar of vaseline inseret in the jaw because the jaw must be open for this stage. If I made the patterns with it closed, the fabric would resist opening. It's easier to fold fabric so the mouth will close than stretching it so it will open. This was one of the problems with Xodiac's jaw, and I didn't intend to repeat it here.

I also didn't intend to repeat showing the lines on the tape as I determined what the cloth patterns were, or display those patterns. I'm pretty sure you get the idea of how to go about it.


I had initially intended to leave the areas around the ears entirely uncovered by cloth. There would, after all, be the ears themselves over that part, and a piece of cloth over and around the ears to make it curve into the head better to boot. And by leaving it uncovered, I could more easily find the holes I'd drilled into the skull through the foam to attach them.

After some thouht, though, I reconsidered. It was easy enough to cut a piece of fabric to cover the area, then poke holes through the drilled spots from the inside. This piece of cloth is mostly covered, but not entirely, and it's not like it added a lot of time and effort, so I'm glad I changed my mind. I only regret not doing so in time to sew it to the rest of the skin. This is glued on seperately, under the main skin of the head.


And this is Onyx, with skin. Overall, I'd say I did a pretty good job. The seams are noticable, as I expected, but they're not as bad as I'd feared. I'd worried that I might have to cut strips of cloth to paste over them, or otherwise find some way to hide them, but I don't think I will. The wrinkles are a bigger problem. I expected them, so I wasn't surprised when they showed up, and most of them were easy to either smoothe out or get pushed to areas where they won't be as obvious. Unfortunately, that's not true about the area around the eyes. There's enough wrinkles there to make him look old, which is definitely not the look I want. That will need fixing before the head is done.

There are two zippers in the back of the head. These will be hidden by the hair, so I only went to moderate effort to cover them. Their purpose is twofold. First, the neck is fairly snug against my real neck, which means it'd be impossible to put on without some way of opening up the neck. One zipper would have served well enough for that, though, which brings up the other reason. Namely, the batteries that power the fans are directly beneath each zipper. They'll allow easy access for battery switching.


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