The Mask of Aku Aku

It's The Physio's birthday. It's a big birthday so The Artivist wanted to get her lots of nostalgia. He's made her a mixed tape (on a memory stick) and compiled lots of photos of them together as children. 

And he wanted to make this:

For those of you who don't know, this is the mask of Aku Aku, which is featured in 90's PS1 game, Crash Bandocoot.

I have a handheld mini grinder what that my parents bought me for Christmas, so I was really excited to find a project that'd let me try it out. 

We found a log to cut up for our mask base, and some other pieces of wood for the facial features, and we dried out all of our wood by leaving it on a rack above an electric heater for a day or two. 

I trimmed two discs off the end of this stick for the eyes and The Artivist painted them with this yellow-orange gradient effect. 

We trimmed another disc and stripped the bark off it, which we cut into two pieces and painted green for the green bags under Aku Aku's eyes. I don't seem to have a picture of them, but you'll see them on the end product. 

We cut two pieces for the eyebrows and painted them red. 

For the mouth, I trimmed a piece of wood to size and cut a hole in the middle. I used a little sander attachment to tidy up the shape in the middle of the top lip. The Artivist mixed a brownish shade of red for lips and painted them. Once the red was dry, I drew shine cracks on the lips with black paint and a skewer. 

I'm not really sure how I made the nose. I started cutting a triangular prism, then I cut the base to a more triangular shape. And I basically hacked away at it until it looked vaguely noise shaped, then I used the little sanding cylinder to tidy it up. I dug a couple of holes for nostrils and painted it the same colour as the eyebrows. 

We wanted the base of the mask to be a piece of bark, so we took this log and hacked a piece off with a saw. It was not an easy job. The Artivist did it. We also cut the bottom two corners of the bark off because the mask doesn't look square in the games. 

At the top, I sanded down the wood that had no bark over it, so the bark itself is more defined as the actual mask. Had I had more time I'd have liked to have removed the under wood from the top altogether, but I think it looks good like this. 

We did cut away the under wood where we trimmed the bottom corners, but don't seem to have any photos of that step. 

We used the little sanding cylinder attachment on my mini grinder to flatten the mask face in the spots where the facial features sit, to make it easier to glue them down.

I used this tool to mark the teeth onto the space that will show between the lips. We painted the teeth white and used a light yellow to define the grooves between teeth.

The Artivist selected which feathers he wanted for Aku Aku's head, then I drilled holes into the top of the wood for the feathers to fit in, with glue to encourage them to stay put. Then we used a generous amount of PVA glue to fix the facial features in place. 

 

We let the mask dry overnight, then sprayed it with clear lacquer to preserve it. 

We're really pleased with the end

 result and, judging from the photo she sent us, so is The Physio.