Halloween Fly Mask

thingiverse

Halloween was approaching fast, and I'd been invited to several parties so I knew I had to come up with something original. A blowfly mask seemed like the perfect idea - I'd never seen one before, and creating something with large compound eyes sounded like an absolute blast. The design only took a few hours to complete. It was made from primitives in Autodesk123D then taken to Meshmixer for textures, hollowing, and smoothing. If you haven't used Meshmixer it's almost like a 3D paint program that allows you to build, smooth, subtract, and texture basic models. Printing was very straightforward with supports used for the face/nose section but not for the eyes. I was in a bit of a rush so printed them at 80mm/s at 0.2mm layer heights. The sections were then melted into position from behind with a hot soldering iron, and the gaps were filled with epoxy glue. It was then just a matter of painting everything black with water-based acrylic paints. After the black had dried I applied a coat of deep red using a sponge - the idea here was that the grooves between the bumps on the eyes would stay dark. I then applied some purple (the only reddish color I had) pearlescent paint over the surface with a sponge to give it that glint. The fur on the face was a little tricky. I had a piece of black fake fur from an off-cuts bin, so I chopped the fibers from the backing and attached them to the face using a thick layer of black acrylic paint. Once I was happy with the effect I sprayed over it with fixative to keep it all in place. The fur around the edges was simply a strip of feather trim from the sewing shop hot glued on, and the whiskers are made of necklace string. The wings were simple enough to design - I simply found some macro images of fly wings through Google Images, touched them up in Photoshop, converted them into vectors using Illustrator, then exported them as .dxf files. I expanded them in Fusion360, then smoothed and manipulated them in Meshmixer. Each wing is printed in 3 pieces: a white wing sandwiched between two sets of black wing veins. I simply epoxy glued the veins onto the wings and used black acrylic paint to cover the edges of the wings where the layers were visible. The two finished wings are then epoxy glued into a center piece which I covered with fur using the same method as the mask. I made the mounting plate as a separate piece that screws onto the wing assembly so that it could be easily replaced if broken. The elastics are just flat 12mm elastics which are stitched into position. I used a small bag clip scaled to 45% which I'd downloaded from Thingiverse to join the elastics, but I realized afterwards that the clips weren't needed as there was plenty of stretch for me to get my arms through it. The costume turned out pretty well, and I even won a prize for my efforts.