This month is women in comics month, and yes, I am a woman who reads comic books. I am also a maker and seeing the fabulous things people have done with wood glue and foam, I decided to experiment with some fabrication and be Batgirl for Halloween.
I posted some of the pictures on Facebook, as I went through the project. That’s when I got a call from my friends, Mary and Steve. Mary is a talented artist and photographer and Steve Neill is a professional makeup and special effects designer.
They had seen my post and he said he would be happy to make a cowl for me. I believe that his very first job in Hollywood was designing Spock’s ears for Star Trek The Motion Picture. He has done tons of movies since, and I was more than happy that he and Mary called. I made arrangements to go to his studio: Steve’s very cool studio.
The first step was making a cast of my head. This required completely covering my head in goo, more commonly referred to as alginate. Once it started to set, he put a plaster bandage exterior around it.
My finished lifecast is to the left in the picture below. Steve then sculpted my cowl on the lifecast to create a perfect fit. He made a mold of the cowl, and cast that. Since Batgirl is a redhead, I got a red wig to go under it.
In the meantime. I modified some boots, made the bat gloves, picked up some batarangs, got a military style utility belt and made the emblem and cape for the suit.
I drew my inspiration from a variety of batgirls in the comics – mostly the New 52 ~2013. I love the television Batgirl, Vyonne Craig, but didn’t feel I could pull off sparkly purple and while I loved meeting the creator of the newest version of Batgirl at Wondercon, Babs Tarr, I didn’t really resonate personally with that reboot – although I’ve loved reading it.
Below are my batgirl boots, which started out as regular black boots.
Here are the gloves. I added the bat wings that I cut out of Plastazote Polyethylene Foam. You can coat this with glue to stiffen it up and make paint adhere to it, although you have to have patience as the process does take time.
Needless to say, the cowl is amazing. Thanks so much, Steve. You rock!
Also a big shoutout to Mary Blank who helped out with some of the sewing, and to Janeece Flint, who passed on her mother’s sewing machine to me. I guess like all good things, it takes a Village and mine is the best.