Mommy Fortuna

Stats
Version: Movie Version (With some added organic touches)
Series: The Last Unicorn
Completed: April 2009
Convention Worn: Anime Central 2009
Awards: Ericka Door’s Hallway Judges Choice ACen 2009

Comments
Recently bought this movie on DVD. I’ve had it on VHS for years but I can’t watch it anymore cause I wore out the video. You know those movies you watched over and over again when you were little that your parent’s wanted to strangle you for? Last Unicorn was that movie for me. Every time we went to the video store I had to get it, until my mom bought it for me. So now I have my old copy and a DVD I can watch. It got me really into the idea of doing a character and Mommy Fortuna is so creepy and would give me a good reason to work with paper mache. I started out with a budget, but then I became a perfectionist… and what was once a project with a budget of 50$ (just to see if I could do it) became something costing me more in the range of $200… even when I tried to be crafty.
I’ll describe the costume from head to toe.
The ‘stump hat,’ as I called it throughout the process. Started as a frame of ducktape and hanger wire. I added paper towel rolls of all shapes and sizes to make up the branches. The main branch in the back I used some left over copper wire from an older project. I then covered it in brown felt and added watered down carpenter’s glue to that to make it dry stiff. Then I used expanding foam on the outside of it to get the texture. I primed it with brown spray paint and painted it using a number of different browns and greens. I hot glued spanish moss to it and spray adhesived minitures grass to make the stump look mossy. I added foam to the inside and sewed in a inner lining. I bought my bird on Ebay (I named him Poe) and he’s glued on and I used fishing line to make sure he stayed in place.
The mask is really my baby and what I had the most fun with. I made a tutorial here on how I did it in case others were thinking about working on a mask and wanted some ideas on how they could begin their own in this style. The mask is a base layer of paper mache to get the base of the mask. I used model magic to get the leverage that the paper mache did not. I then used Paperclay over that to get a smoother more unified surface. I then painted it. The eyes are styrofoam balls covered in model magic with a few layers of Modge Podge to give them a realistic look. The teeth are foamies.
I made the shoulders out of foam after looking at some football equipment online. I spray adhesive and sewed on older torn brown fabric and then sewed around the edged to keep it in place. I then added three layers of the fabric over top of the shoulders so that it would get a swaying in the breeze look. I kept some fabric over the head part for the hood. The necklaces are connected to the shoulder. The ball necklace is styrofoam balls covered in paper mache and painted. The bones and the red jewel are model magic. My Little Cthulhu action figure acted as the base I used to make the skull its shape. (I need to find the picture)
The robes I pattered from an old bathrobe of my own. I used a long sleeve shirt to connect the gloves too and the gloves I bought from a Halloween store and painted to match the skin on the face. The boots were covers over my normal shoes, made baggy so they looked like the 7 dwarf shoes like Mommy’s look like.