Hello, people! Over the holidays, I accidentally took a MUCH longer break from this blog than I meant to - oops!! - and so I thought a good way to drop back in would be reviewing a less recent piece! Specifically, one that I’ve been meaning to put on my website for a while, but have procrastinated for a plethora of irrelevant excuses reasons! So without further explanation, here’s my extremely belated post about my 2024 halloween costume!

Over the past couple of years, I’ve really stepped up my halloween costumes. To illustrate my point, I’ve tried to compile a list of all my halloween costumes, with help from my parents! Here is that:

2009- Rocky the flying squirrel (my parents were Boris and Natasha)

Interruption- I think I was also somehow a bunny that year? There are a lot of photos of baby me in a yellow bunny costume.

2010- Ladybug… ish? (here’s a picture so you can see what I mean)

From left- my cousin Gigi, (a bunny, I think…?) my cousin Eli, (either an oompaloompa or a tiger?) and me (a ladybug-baby)

2011- nobody can remember what I was that year, but this marks the shift between when I started CHOOSING my costumes, versus just being dressed up. (You’ll notice the ideas get steadily worse as my parents had less input)
2012- Vampire (here’s a photo of me trying -and failing- to be menacing with my triangle eyebrows and gigantic teeth)

2013- Another forgotten costume… we can’t find any pictures of my getup that year, but I suspect it had something to do with vampires and kitties.

2014- Leopard. Had you asked me back then, I think I would’ve told you I was an ocelot, but I was obviously a leopard.

2015- The devil incarnate- I think I just wanted the pitchfork, to be honest.

2016- Vampire-kitty, again??

2017- Panda! I think I had just seen Kung-fu panda or something. I obtained a panda onesie, stuffed blankets and pillows down the front, and waddled around. That was a very fortuitous costume for that year, because it did end up snowing, with temperatures around like 20 degrees. But guess who wasn’t cold!

2018- Yet another forgotten costume :(

2019- Either a robber or a mime? The pictures aren’t that clear, and neither was my costume.

2020- Dracula. Hoo boy. That was the year I chalk-dyed my hair black, and used about six times as much dye-spray as I needed. Some of the washcloths in the shower still -STILL- have black stains on them. I think I chose the costume solely because I wanted to see what I would look like with black hair.

2021- This was the year I started to be more creative with my costumes!!! In 2021 I actually had TWO costumes: the first was a mushroom, because earlier that year I had made a cardboard mushroom hat that was taller than I was, and I wanted to show it off. Good GRIEF, my neck hurt after that. The second was a jellyfish, which I made from ribbons, colorful lights, and a clear umbrella. It hangs from the rafters in my garage to this day.

2022- Barn owl! This costume was actually really cool. I made a papier-mache mask, painted it up really nice, and got a feathery white scarf to wrap around the edges. I even mastered the creepy owl head turning thing. The only downside was that I focused more on the DESIGN aspects, and less on the… structural ones. In other words, I couldn’t see. I had to have my dad and my best friend lead me around. Also, my nose was bent weird when I eventually took the mask off.

And finally, 2023! Well, I say 2023, but it was really the halloween of 2024? My birthday’s in February, so the math doesn’t line up perfectly. But, regardless, last year I was determined to build a twelve-foot-tall Great Blue Heron costume. I designed it, did the math, improvised when the math failed, and eventually achieved my goal! You can see the finished result here:

This was by far the most complicated costume I’ve attempted thus far, but I really enjoyed working on it, even still! And I LOVE how it turned out! I think I’m going to do more big costumes/sculptures like this, this year. I love the feeling of “building” art, and then interacting with it! I definitely could’ve more efficiently done some of the construction on the Heron, though.

Basically, the structure of the costume is, well, me. I found two fuzzy blue blankets at Goodwill, sewed them together, threw it over me, and stuck up my elbow to give the illusion of a shoulder-blade. The neck is an old striped sheet (also from Goodwill) that I stitched into a tube and stuffed with plastic bags and packing materials that otherwise would’ve gone to a landfill.

The neck ended up being about thirty pounds in the end, because of the packing materials I used to stuff it with, and also just because of it’s sheer SIZE. The neck is about thirteen feet long, if you lay it out flat. Because of this, it’s suspended with a twelve-foot PVC pipe from Lowes. The pipe is flexible, so my plan originally was to shove it THROUGH the neck itself, but that ended up 1.) looking really strange, and 2.) being really, REALLY hard to hold up. So, I improvised!

The method I eventually landed on is to hold one end of the PVC up under the blanket, while the other end is connected to the head, with the long neck draping loosely under it. I’m actually really happy with the method I landed on, because it gives the neck a lot of movement. It bobs and sways with every step I take, making it look alive.

As you may have assumed, this was an EXTREMELY heavy costume. the whole thing ended up being around sixty-sixty five pounds. (I know, that’s what I said) The actual head really contributed to that. the head is made from a cardboard skeleton wrapped in duct tape “skin” and painted with acrylic. The eye is a paper plate turned upside down and stuffed with more packing material. The inside of the skull is stuffed with styrofoam, with the PVC stabbed into the middle and supported with screws and duct tape (very secure, as you may imagine) The “hair” is a Nature Valley bar box I cut into strips and waterproofed with yet more duct tape. After it was built, I spray-painted it, detailed in acrylic and also a pot of really old “shimmering sapphire” paint, and set it aside to dry!

I wanted to make sure that the head was the most detailed part, to really draw your eye right to it, and away from my legs. It’s generally good to have 2-3 places of focus in your art, so I wanted to ENSURE that the head was the biggest focal point. The other point of detail is the neck, I think. The movement of it inherently draws the eye, and it leads you right back up to the head.

Overall, I’m really pleased with how this ended up. It was a really inspiring costume to work on, as well! I’m already planning out my next big costume. (spoiler alert- it’s even MORE complicated and gigantic. I’m talking multiple-person level.) Big thanks to everyone who helped me with this costume!!!! (Dad, thanks for fixing that incident with the drill) And thank YOU for reading this really long post! I swear it wasn’t this long in my mind:)

Heron Costume

SCAD Trip!

Today’s Sketchbook Drawing- Greenland House!