Demon Head

The idea to make a demon head was put in my brain after seeing these masks for sale on the Pumpkinrot Blog. Right around the same time, I visited Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios and got some more inspiration. One of their haunted houses in 2008 was called The Hallow. This maze was filled with all sorts of classic Halloween imagery, including witches. The witch scene in this haunted house featured a big cauldron with wonderful demon faces around it's rim. Knowing that my witches were lacking a proper cauldron, I decided that I was going to attempt to recreate the professional movie studio quality prop using paper mache.

I got busy building. I figured the demon heads to decorate the rim of the cauldron would take the most time so I started them first. The cauldron was started and I ended up building a frame out of rolled up newspaper, but as Halloween came closer and closer, I realized there wasn't any way I was going to finish. Once I had my realization, I put the cauldron aside and decided to at least finish a few of the heads.

This Instructable documents the results.

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Step 1: Armature...

When building the demon heads, I needed something to use as an armature to put paper mache over. I could have used a pre-made plastic skull, but that would have been cheating in my opinion. I like making all of my paper mache creatures from scratch. I ended up making the armature out of crumpled up newspaper, aluminum foil, and duct tape.

The rounded top of the head was made from a few sheets of newspaper crumpled up into a ball. For the eye sockets, I took a sheet of aluminum foil and pressed two ping pong balls into it to form the shape. The lower part of the head was made from more newspaper, and finally all of the newspaper was covered in aluminum foil. The different parts were all duct taped together into one uniform armature.