Amy Baker Art: Making the Headdress

First off, I thought Id show some pictures of what my work space looks like and all of my supplies gathered together.

So now that you see what I'm workin with. Lets get to making this headdress.
In my previous blog post, I shared how I changed the lambskin into the dark brown python for this project. Here's how I put it all together.

First I grabbed the headdress and the costume horns. As you can see from this pic, the headdress is misshapen from shipping and the Disney horns are quite a bit larger than the crushed ones on the headdress. To fix this, I hit the whole headdress with a heat gun. This allowed me to let it cool in the right shape and it released the adhesive keeping the horns on the rubber headdress.

Next I stuck my fingers in that molding hole and cut out the end of the foam horn

The horns have a plastic tube that guides the elastic through. I cut this out as well

This is what the headdress end looks like with the horn detached. I coated it in contact cement.

After coating the inside of the horns with contact cement, I affixed them over the horn holders on the headdress.

So far so good. Now they dont fit exactly so I made sure to angle them the right way so they line up as much as possible to how I want them.

I know the horns look large on my little mannequin bust but I have a far bigger head and the profile looks good.

This is what the headdress looks like from top down.

Now comes the snakeskin part. I used a LOT of still frame reference from the movie and from costume exhibits for this part. The guy who created the turban wraps spent a long time learning from the masters on how to do it so I had to wing it big time. Also, I wasnt using a python skin but a printed lambskin so mine is going to have an added level of difficulty.

I cut my printed leather in a way closest to what the costume fabricators did. Its not completely movie accurate but the best I was gonna get with the supplies I had. Here are some progress shots of wrapping the turban with smaller strips.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. There were two different snake skin headdresses she wore so I kinda smashed the two wrap styles together and this is how it all turned out: