'Carol' from 'Where the wild things are'(Movie) Costume

Step 7 Arms and Hands

Arms and hands were entirely made of foam with leather gloves glued in at the hands. If you were using a thinner foam in this case you might want to have a double thickness at the hands, but don't glue it in at first. The intent in cutting the arms was to have enough foam to cover the outside of my arm, with the inside just being covered by fur. I cut it so that it would hang to slightly lower than I estimated the end of Carol's hands to come (from the perspective guide again). Since I wanted the hands to work, and be useable for picking things up, I was planning on having the foam extend a couple of inches beyond the end of my hand, but have the fingers and pad of my hand be mostly clear. On the originally cut of the foam, which also had to take into account how much was left, was wider towards the hands to allow for a monstrous spread of the fingers later. Later test wearing of the costume showed that the arms bent sort of weirdly, so I cut a triangle out of each with a point at the elbow, which let them bend forwards (like arms do).

If you had exact measurements of this, you could do the arms and hand before attaching them. As it is, it's possible that you could tack the arms in place and work out where the hands should be, then remove the arms and work on them separately. I didn't do that, and it can be difficult sometimes to work on the hands while they're attached to the body.

My mannequin doesn't have hands, so at this point I had to take the body off and try it on. Wearing the gloves, put your arms into the 'sleaves' and mark on the foam where the hands should be. Or you can put a bit of hot glue to temporarily stick the gloves in place - a word of warning though, the glue is very hot and it will hurt through the gloves.

Then you want to cut the foam in between the fingers, so it's a good idea to have marked/glued the gloves with the fingers spread out. You want to have the foam fingers be just over 0.25" wider than the glove fingers wherever possible and a few inches longer - however long you imagine finger extensions and claws being, there're all going to be cut from this foam. Using an X-acto knife, carefully cut out an indented glove shape into the foam so that the glove will end up actually set into the foam. When your hand is in the glove it should be completely inside the level of the foam, so you'll be digging into foam as deep as your fingers are thick. Then glue the gloves into the space that you've just cut out. For the fingers, the best way I found to do this is to put your hand in the glove, squeeze hot glue around the finger and then with your other hand squeeze the foam around you gloved finger. As before, this will hurt, but it probably won't actually burn you. Just be careful.

If you were using the thinner foam at this stage, you don't need to do the digging out of foam with the X-acto knife. Probably you could just, having cut the first piece of foam into the shape of the monster hand, cut another piece the same size and cut a glove shaped hole right out of it. Then glue the second layer and the glove on together.

The next step is to cut the fingers and claws out of the foam, but I'll come back to those in the step about horns and claws..