Happy Halloween to all our readers who celebrate this weekend (and Monday)! My SO and I have a particular fondness for this particular holiday. Not for any specific reason other than we like to come up with good costumes. This year, after some serious debate and wishy-washiness, we decided to be attendees to the Goblin Ball. For those of you who are devout Brian Froud and Terry Jones fans and who love the movie Labyrinth, you should know what I am talking about. For those who don’t know what I am referring to (or who have forgotten, after all, the movie is getting a little old now), here is an excellent video of the ball scene from the movie (and yes, that is David Bowie as the Goblin King).

The most time consuming part of this was trying to decide how we would go about creating our costumes and how much of an homage we wanted to pay to the creators. We ended up doing our own versions of two guests at the ball with a little more color added as we were no longer just background scenery for Sarah and Jareth.

The masks were the first things we started discussing and working out designs. My SO based his on a raven king plastic mask found at the costume shop while mine is based on a paper-mache (papier-mâché) domino mask found at the same costume shop. Then we added lots more paper-mache and plaster to complete our goblin masks.

At this point (for my mask much more so than his) there was quite a bit of carving to do to get a sinister, craggy face. With a dremel tool and some clay carving tools I had left over from an old art class, we proceeded to make an absolute mess on our kitchen table and floor. After some agony and repairs done by my SO to my mask, we both finally had something that we really liked. My SO painted his with a tea stain and mine he painted green, then overlaid that with a darker pearlescent green. Overall, my SO finished his mask in about a day and a half, and we worked on mine for about the same amount of time in total.

If you haven’t figured our between the lines, the masks were mostly done by my SO. He is an excellent artist and crafts-person when it comes to plaster and painting. He used to make the scenery and set pieces for the table-top role-playing games he played.

Our costumes were a bit more difficult to come up with and I will dedicate a whole other post to those tomorrow. We are definitely going to have some fun tomorrow night! I will certainly post some pictures of us in our completed costumes.