One of the oldest art forms found worldwide in every culture and society is mask making. I love making masks and really enjoy making them with children too. The above photo depicts some large scale masks I made with 30 children a couple of years ago. We formed them with paper mache on chickenwire and then set them to music with one friend creating a musical score and another friend creating the choreography. It was an amazing way to see the masks celebrated. They became a moving musical mask mobile!
There really are so many variations and ways and materials to make masks that you could make a mask every day for a year and not duplicate them. Just by going to your local library and exploring the books on a particular culture through their masks, will lend some ideas too! Here are some links to some masks and methods to make masks with your children and as always yourself!
Using the ever favorite paper mache you can create a pharoah mask,cultural masks,pumpkin masks,African masks,and for older children - the rigid plaster mask is quite exciting. Sometimes a prompt for a child can be as easy as asking them to show a feeling they have or want to pretend to express through their mask. Everyone can make a mask from a paperplate. Remember too, if you don’t have paint for the mask, using fabric, tissue paper, scraps of yarn, bottlecaps, cotton wool, and other found objects can be more interesting than paint or markers!
Here are a couple of links to two friends of mine who make and use masks as their artform - both visually and with the performing arts: Jeanne McCartin visual artist and Bonnie and Andrew Periale who are renound puppeteers using masks as part of their performances. This summer we travelled to Montreal, Quebec and saw the most incredible masks made by Canadian artist Brian Jungen. They were some of the most moving works in masks that I have ever seen. The list is endless. Masks are everywhere!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 26th, 2006 at 9:10 am and is filed under home+children. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.