Masks and Armor class: maquettes

This semester, the topic of my class is Masks and Armor, and my students have just turned in the first of their projects, maquettes! Maquettes are small-scale 3D sculptures of mask designs, and the first step in working with a costume designer on the making of a mask--it allows the crafts artisan to take an initial stab at translating the designer's rendering/research from 2-dimensional imagery to a 3-dimensional sculptural object. By starting with a maquette at a half or quarter scale of the finished mask, a maskmaker can work much quicker and use less material than if s/he were to start sculpting immediately in a full-scale iteration.

Here are some pix of their maquettes!
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