woodland animal masks

I recently left my full time job at the Museum of Science, but before I did I was happy to work on these masks for the Discovery Center. If you’ve never been there before, you should go – it’s an awesome hands-on science space for kids 8 & under. They had some animal masks they’d been using for woodland animal interpretations but the original company that had made them discontinued the line. I was happy to step in to make the ones they were missing – a rabbit, a beaver, a skunk and a wood turtle. I did a few pencil drafts first then scanned in the sketches & cleaned them up. After that I printed, painted by hand with gouache and then scanned again. 

Rabbit options – original on left, then a more relaxed version, plus an option with teeth.

The discovery center staff chose to go with teeth for a more-rabbit like appeal

The teeth on this beaver looked a bit too tongue-like on the first pass –

…once I painted it, I straightened the teeth out to make them more like little chisels.

This skunk originally had white fur at the top, as you see above…

….but when I painted it I decided it looked better to go black all the way up.

This wood turtle was my favorite of the pencil sketches.

The painting took a while since I couldn’t hide behind lots of hair!