In this photo, Hannah, an 8 year old student in my Sculpt It class, poses in her “birthday suit”. The materials she used to create this costume were Rigid Wrap (plaster impregnated gauze cloth available at most art supply stores), and my favorite, paper mache.
Here’s how she did it:
The first thing we did was make a little garbage bag dress for Hannah, wrapped tightly around her torso with masking tape. Then we created a body cast made with the Rigid Wrap. Her Pal Sonia cut the plaster into around 5″ strips, soaked them in water for a bit and applied them directly to her torso. She built it up to around a 1/4″ thick. Sonia uses a blow dryer to hasten the drying process:
After building a cardboard armature for the “birthday cake skirt” and attaching it to the body cast, Hannah applies layers of paper mache (we use a mixture of flour, water and Elmer’s glue).
Once dry, she paints the whole thing a lovely shade of turquoise and pink. For the candles, she hot-glued cardboard paper towel rolls, and scrunched up aluminum foil for the “fire”. For the frosting embellishments, she used a tub caulking silicone gun to make the festive flourishes! To get it to stay on her body, she made holes on both sides and tied it up like shoelaces with thin rope. The birthday hat/candle was created by wrapping her head (many times) with aluminum foil and covering it with masking tape.
Here is Hannah’s pal Sonia disguised as a plate of pancakes. Notice the syrup issuing from the pitcher on her head!