The Great Crown of Chicken Wire!

After doing some research into headdresses it was time to work towards actually making one! Since a some if the headdresses that I've been looking at were semi-circle shaped and made in a sort of headband like way, so I quickly cut out a piece of cardboard just to get a rough idea about what I could do...... but I wasn't feeling it it. 

First Brainstorming of a Headdress

So I looked at the other types of headdresses and found that the decorated crown looked really beautiful, so because I always like to bit off more than I can chew I went with making a crown instead! 

Looking at these photos there is a common structural feature in how they are made - a three tier crown-like-hat (completely makes sense) and the decorative front. Which looks very hard to make (oh dear) but I started with the three layered hat part. I used chicken wire to create the structure which can I say was damn hard, being scratched and having your fingertips turn red due to a stupid amount of wire bending was not fun. However I managed to get a wonky but relatively similar shape, 

First Teir

Second Level

Final Wire Structure

Then the next step was to cover the chicken wire crown in newspaper and glue, which again was a pig since the newspaper didn't have anything to stick to so it was a hard job getting to pieces of floppy newspaper to stick to each other through out the chicken wire so I could have somewhere as a proper starting point for this paper-mache. It was a struggle but I managed to get it covered and I left it to dry.

Newspaper Covered

Painted White 

After I finished that I went about designing the front piece which I thought to cut out of board and then perhaps paint on or cover with fabric but the design is still a work in progress.

After designing this I needed to get an idea of how the lower headband piece this would fit on my head when I have my mask on, and try to measure and shape my design around that. 

Looks a little creepy doesn't it?

What my next steps is to do is to correct measure and cut out the rest of the head piece as accurately as I can.