Day two of the mask intensive

It seems somewhat anticlimactic to say that day two began with much of what we did on day one: refining the clay features, checking for symmetry, getting the face the way you want it. My Dottore began to feel very much like me. In fact, twice I sprayed water on the cheeks to smooth out the clay, and almost instantly I felt as though I were close to tears. (I chalked it up to the plaster dust in the air, but no mistake, there's something spooky about the kinship between actor and mask.)

Once the faces were in good shape, we constructed frames for them out of flat slabs of clay. Rather than simply framing the face positives, the frames went around the edges of the final mask (more or less from the upper lip to the earlobe at the bottom, and a couple of centimeters above the hairline at the top). So suddenly our masks all looked like bib-wearing conquistadores--with the exception of Zach's Magnifico, whose frame and props looked like flowing hair and so turned him into a distant kinsman of Michelangelo's Moses.

The frames had a purpose, which was to contain drips of plaster. We mixed up great tubs of it--you stir it with your fingers, an experience that rivals kneading bread for sheer pleasure--and then drizzled it over the faces, with the same gestures I remember using to make mud-drip sand castles as a child. Once the face is covered and you've carefully blown on all the bubbles until they pop, you dip strips of fabric--coarse burlap in this case--into the plaster. Then you put a layer of plaster-coated fabric over the whole face.

By then, the plaster was thickening, so we had to hurry through the best part: scooping up fistfuls of plaster and splatting them over the fabric. (It's fun because, well, you're scooping up big messy fistfuls of plaster, but also because plaster gets warm as it dries, probably because of some oxidation process I should remember from chemistry.) Each mask turned into a featureless mound of white plaster; the long-nosed Capitano masks were slightly distinguished by a peak in the middle of the mound. We smoothed out the mounds with a spatula. Zach pointed out that they looked like nothing so much as a window display of gelato. All vanilla.

Tomorrow the plaster will have hardened into a negative, which will be the basis for the latex mask itself. I hope that will yield some good photos--the closeup of the featureless white lump didn't quite make for a riveting image.