Building a "Wintercroft" paper mask

With Halloween just around the corner, what better way to prepare than building a doomsday costume?  Wintercroft.com designs and sells excellent low-poly mask templates so you can build any of dozens of different designs with nothing more than some card and tape.

The first step was attaching the printed templates to the cardstock and cutting them out.  For the gas mask design in particular, this didn't take too terribly long.  Getting all the folds just right took a bit of time and piecing together all the different parts was definitely a headache at first.  Taping the flaps so that all parts are aligned right was a little frustrating but in all honesty still not that time-consuming.

I decided to spray paint the mask to give it a much more finished look.  It's important that if you paint it, you cover up all Scotch tape with masking tape so that the paint can stick - use as much or as little masking tape as you like.  I painted in two separate pieces and attached them afterwards, it was much easier than using painter's tape to cover off certain areas during painting.

After painting, it was time to attach the pieces together and add the "mesh" areas.  These were done with simple construction paper, an Exacto knife, and a ruler.

Almost done, now we just need to add a strap.  An elastic band would be nice, but some cardstock wrapped in duct tape works pretty well in a pinch.

After that, I just added a few little decals here and there - a biohazard symbol and a Fallout "Vault-Tec" logo as well.

And, for a finishing Halloween touch, some "blood" splatter.  I mixed red paint with a tiny bit of dark grey (should've used a bit more black or brown for a darker finish in retrospect), added a bit of water, and flicked it from a medium sized flat paintbrush.  This one flick did the job nicely and wasn't too much of a mess to deal with either.

And that's about it, hope you found it interesting and maybe got a useful tip or two, and happy Halloween!

Link to template:

https://wintercroft.com/collections/masks/products/gas-mask