Blighted Beak Mask Tutorial - Team Fortress 2

The lovely Blighted Beak mask for the medic. Due to my odd obsession with plague doctors I am surprised this didn’t come up sooner. Alright, kiddies, allons-y.

Here’s what you’ll need:

- Leather (Varying thicknesses. Don’t know the technical measurements, so check the pics. Used a somewhat thick stuff for most of the mask, then a little bit of thin material for ze “goggles”)

- Leather scissors or just some strong scissors

- x-acto

- Leather hole punch

- a “gold” buckle (mine was probably smaller than what’s in the game version, so size is up to you)

- Rivets

- Clear acrylic plastic (I bought a cheap acrylic frame from michael’s)

- Acrylic paint: White and burnt umber(or whatever sort of brown strikes your fancy)

- Super glue (My trusty solution for everything. Super glue all your problems away)



CONTINUE THE TUTORIAL:













Draw out your main mask piece on paper. Should look something like this. Make your eyes perfect circles.





























Trace onto thicker leather. Cut out. Soak in water and shape it into the correct shape. Use your face to get the face right. The beak can take a while. Just keep at it.



























Try to keep the eye holes as circular as possible. They tend to get deformed at this stage.

































Let dry until hard. Paint white. I did a light wash of burnt umber to give it an aged look.





































Paint tip of beak with burnt umber like sooo.































Cut out two strips of the thin leather. Paint brown.



























Fit into each eye socket. Unless you’re a pro or bothered to measure like I did not, it probably will overlap itself.



































So keep trimming until it fits. Super glue into place.





























Cut out two circles from the acrylic. I used sand paper on mine to give it that frosted look. Would not recommend this if you’d like to see out of it. If you like having eyes, just leave clear.



























Super glue into eyes. You may need to trim the edges to make them fit.

































Cut out two leather strips. The width should be based on how big your buckle is. The length should be based on how gigantic your noggin is. One should be shorter than the other, so that the buckle appears on the side of the head.

























Cut slit into end of short piece.



























I stupidly did not paint my strip brown before this step. I recommend that you do. Then super glue your leather together to keep buckle in place. If you’re feeling fancy you can use a rivet. But I hate rivets and rivets hate me.





























On your long strip round one end.

































Cut out two leather pieces in this shape. Hole punch two holes like so.

































Fit rivets into holes. Once again I can’t install rivets for crap, so I superglued mine in. >_> Then super glue your short piece to one of these after they’re all painted.



























For the long piece punch some holes into the end so you can tighten and loosen the mask. Then paint it. Then superglue it to your other riveted piece.





























Super glue a rivet piece to each side of mask like so.





























And you are done, you fabulous German bastard.



















