Desert Festival 2010 - Mask-Making Workshop

I had never been to a Desert Festival workshop before but now that I have the time I said "Why not?" The Mask Making Workshop caught my eye and I went to it. The ladies there had almost everything you need - mask bases, feathers, fabric, paper, glue, glitter - you name it!

I started with a blank mask and not knowing what to do. The ladies suggested that I have a concept or and idea before I set off doing anything. I looked around at the materials and saw the many cans of spray paint. This brought me back to a guy named Wayne Gabaylo, an artist in Ouahu Hawaii, who makes all of his artworks out of spray painting! He makes a show out of the process too, putting layer after layer on top of each other to produce such stunning and imaginative artwork!

That's when I decided - This mask is going to be inspired by W. Gabaylo

You must keep in mind that I didn't have any experience with spray paint, nor did I know where to start. And as you can see by my picture, there were plenty of spectators observing what people were creating. I cut my mask a bit and here I have me holding it up with half of it covered by a piece of paper on an angel. I was going to spray half of my mask red.

And here's my outcome. I proceeded to spray the bottom half black. Very freehand that had an unknown posh effect to the mask. 

(Above: My sister's test mask - she now adores spray paint!)

I also cut out a tiny stencil of a cat head and used that to be my template for little silver spray-on cat heads!

I saw and old ribbon in the pile of fabric, emu feathers and little craft flowers. Tests, trials and a lot of glue-covered feathers later, I came to this arrangement of the different additional flares and I am very happy with them! I found some spray-on adhesive and on the other side of the mask, sprayed like crazy and dusted it with blue stars!

Here are now my 2 masks all done! The black and red one is my final and the smaller one was my little test with spray-cans!

And here's a good vid I found of him doing his stuff on the streets of Hawaii