Some Variants On My Black Cat Mask. The Bloody Tears One I Painted Before Halloween, At The Same Time

Some variants on my black cat mask. The bloody tears one I painted before Halloween, at the same time as I did that bird mask from earlier. The silvery red one has been sitting in my box of stock for a while, it was mostly a test of this pearlescent dye additive I got.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/158428025/black-cat-mask

Here’s that sleigh bell harness in action. I hope it gives a sense for just how loud this thing is. Wow. Maybe 30 bells was too many?

Nah.

Someone asked for a version of my buckled hatchwork bracelet, but sized as a collar. So here it is!

Leather dragon costume! Matching set of head and tail! I’m very excited, this project was many months in the making. 

Aesthetically I was aiming for something sort of halfway in between a fursuit and kink gear. I think the black leather and rivets pull the image pretty strongly towards the latter, giving it a sleek and somewhat sinister vibe.

It’s a hollow shell, not built on a resin or foam base. The leather used is a somewhat firm but flexible chrome re-tanned one, with a very clean semi-glossy finish.

The head has enough space to be worn over glasses! You can see mine in some of the photos. The eyes are clear acrylic, giving a pretty good unobstructed field of vision. The horns are birch plywood laminated together into a solid form. The head opens in the back and laces closed with nylon paracord. The tail is stuffed with poly-fill, and held on with a pair of belt loops.

I designed everything in 3D in Rhino. Because the pieces were pretty big I actually hand-cut all the leather pieces rather than laser-cutting them as I often do. (The plywood for the horns was laser-cut.) You can see some of that process here.

And of utmost importance, this is up for sale! Here’s the Etsy link! If it sells I’ll get to make a new one and try out more new ideas!

Here’s a comparison series with a couple jackal masks. A while back I was experimenting with an alternate method of doing black leather. On the right you see the normal black dye I use. The left mask, though, I used a chemical process to color. You rust a bunch of steel wool into vinegar (making a solution I believe is called vinegaroon), then when you brush it onto the leather it reacts with the tanins in the leather to produce a black or very dark brown color. It’s apparently the same chemical reaction that was used to make super long-lasting ink Back In The Day. If you really hit the leather hard with it, it does go quite dark black, or if you’re a bit light with the application it stays a dark brown as seen here.

I ended up not continuing to use it much for a couple reasons. It seemed to change the texture/stiffness of the leather a bit, making it less pliable and more dry, so it seems to want to get oiled or waxed more than I normally do. I also had a couple issues when it touched other masks, where some of the chemical leeched out into the neighboring pieces and got a blotch of black on them. So it’d need to be sealed harder all around the piece, where I usually like to leave the back side of the leather un-sealed for moisture/drying reasons. (The vinegar solution tended to soak all the way through the leather, so only coloring the front surface wasn’t exactly tenable.) But honestly, mostly the issue was just that it was yet another process and option to have materials for and to fuss over, when it didn’t seem that it was going to be substantially different from my normal process, at least from the point of view of the customer and finished product.

The vinegar-iron colored jackal sold at Arisia, so it’s no longer sitting around in a box! Hooray, somebody is enjoying it!

Thanks for the garbage website.

I was trying to upload a little video but every time it bugged out with “Oh no! Something went wrong! Could you upload your video again?” until it gave me this.

So here watch it on my twitter instead: https://twitter.com/armored_dragon/status/1080514988257787905