Giant eyeball masks for Halloween 2024!

Published by Manning on October 30th, 2024

For our Monster Prom Halloween party, my wife and I made matching giant eyeball masks. They were fun to make and easy to wear, and they were a big hit at our party! Here’s how we made ’em…

I’m putting this disclaimer on all my Halloween 2024 (Monster Prom) projects: I was in such a panic this year I did not take many progress photos of anything! And the pics I did take are at really random stages. So I’ll dump all my pics for each project near the top, and just write up all my steps below those.

This backstory may be TMI, but we started out by ordering some inflatable bouncy balls off of Amazon, and this was a disaster. I’ve had great success with this in the past; for certain projects I’ve needed to make a sphere that’s a specific size, and I’d just find a bouncy ball in that size on Amazon and order that. Well, this time, we ordered some inflatable balls that were supposed to be 18″, and when we inflated them completely they were more like 11″. So I returned those and ordered a different but similar product from a different seller on Amazon, and the same thing happened. We wasted a lot of time just trying to find a ball that would be big enough.

We ended up going to a sporting goods store and buying 24″ inflatable yoga balls, with the hope that the size would be accurate, and it was, more or less. The finished eyeballs are more like 22 or 23 inches, which is fine! That’s actually bigger than what I’d originally wanted to do for these masks.

Okay, so the first step, after inflating the yoga balls, was to cover them in aluminum foil, held in place with lots of shipping tape. This is difficult to do because tape does not want to stick to this kind of plastic. A trick that helps is to start by putting a loooooong piece of tape all the way around the ball, so the tape can stick to itself. Then do another big ring of tape crossing that one, etc etc. Then you can start taping the aluminium foil to the tape. It starts out tricky but gets easier as you go.

Once that was done, we covered the yoga balls with six layers of paper maché, using thick paper from Whole Foods bags for the earlier layers, and finishing with some thinner paper to have a somewhat smoother, less wrinkled surface. You can read about my paper maché process and materials here.

When all those layers were done we let them dry for a good 48 hours.

Then we measured and drew some circles to cut out: a big circle where one’s head goes in, another big circle for the iris area, and some extra holes on the sides and back — these are to help with hearing and air circulation. We cut out all these holes with an X-acto knife and then reinforced the edges with a layer of small pieces of paper maché.

We spray painted the interior of the eyeballs black, but we skipped the inside-top part, since that’s where we would glue in the helmet-like structure later on. Glue holds better on plain paper than it does on spray paint.

We’d paint the exterior of the eyeballs later…

Making the iris and pupil

This part was a fun challenge but ended up being pretty easy! We install pieces of screen door material (“pet screen,” to be precise) in all of our masks, and sometimes we paint the screen, depending on the mask. My real challenge with this piece was: how to create a piece of screen that’s bulged out like it’s part of the sphere? I didn’t want the iris/pupil area to just be a flat window of screen. So I made up a method that worked out great. (By the way, you can totally skip this next very labor-intensive part and just go with a flat window of screen! I enjoy doing this complicated stuff for some reason.)

I measured the hole for the iris/pupil and saw that it was 11″, so I cut out a piece of screen that was a 13″ circle.

I also cut out a 13″ circle of poster board. I then cut a smaller circle out of that, leaving me with a thin ring of poster board, about 1/2″ wide all the way around. This will be sort of a frame for the bulged-out screen shape.

I used the top of the eyeball as sort of a mold to create the bulging screen shape. I set the poster board ring onto the eyeball, and I saw that it didn’t want to sit very flat, so I decided to cut the ring into four pieces and tape them in place on top of the eyeball, and then tape the ends of the pieces together, to make them into one ring shape (again). That did the trick; I now had a poster board ring that sat nicely on top of the eyeball.

I carefully removed the poster board ring from the top of the eyeball, and then I covered the top of the eyeball with aluminum foil, taped in place. This is so I could hot-glue the screen material onto the poster board ring without worrying about getting hot glue on the eyeball itself. I put the poster board ring back onto the eyeball, on top of the aluminum foil, and I taped it in place so it wouldn’t move.

Now, of course, if I were to lay the circle of screen onto the poster board ring, it would not want to mold to the eyeball shape. So I cut a bunch of lines in the screen, from the outer edges pointing inward, about three inches long. I cut eight of these lines all the way around the circle. Now I could lay the screen onto the eyeball, and I could easily mold it onto the sphere shape.

Time for hot glue. I carefully hot-glued the screen material onto the poster board ring, all the way around. Some of the hot glue got onto the aluminum foil, and this was no problem. When the whole thing was done, I lifted the aluminum foil off of the eyeball and pulled my new iris/pupil screen off of it. Wherever it was stuck, I just snipped the foil with scissors.

The resulting iris/pupil screen shape was nice and domed, and it felt a bit flimsy, but it’ll be fine once it’s hot-glued into the eyeball mask. But first, painting…

I wanted to spray paint the iris to be green, but of course I wanted the pupil to be black. I made up a complicated method with masking tape to mask out a perfect circle in the exact middle of the iris; I won’t bore you with the details of that. I spray-painted the whole thing green, let it dry, and then removed the masking tape circle to reveal the nice black iris.

Pro tip: if you ever spray paint screen material, it’s important to watch for any places where the paint starts to fill up the little holes in the screen. The fix for that is to blow on them; if you’re fast enough you’ll be able to clear the paint out of the holes before it sets. This also means you can’t spray paint the screen while it’s laying on a flat surface; the paint will pool in the holes and you can’t blow through it to clear them out. So whenever I’m going to spray paint a piece of screen I always make a simple frame for it out of foam board or whatever and tape the screen to that before painting. All of this is very easy; just a lot of steps. I enjoy this kind of junk!

Okay, after the spray paint was done, I wanted to paint some darker green lines on the iris. I set the iris/pupil on top of the eyeball again to support it, and I used some green acrylic paint and a wide paint brush to gently brush some green lines and shadows onto the screen. To do this, I put some paint on the brush and then brushed most of it onto a piece of paper, to keep just the minimum amount of paint on the brush. Then I gently dabbed this onto the screen to create the subtle lines.

Okay, making the eyeball and the iris/pupil were the easy parts! Now the hard part…

Making the wearable helmet thing

I usually use a hard hat in all my big masks, but I wanted to try something different for this one. I made a structure out of foam board and hot glue to serve as the wearable thing that goes on my head and is glued into the top of the mask. I’m not going to explain every single step of this convoluted thing, but here are the main bits…

I cut two strips of foam board, one to fit around my head as a headband, and another to go over the top of my head from front to back, so the headband can’t get pushed down lower on my head. I bought a big bag of foam makeup pads, cut a bunch of them in half, and hot-glued them inside the headband and top band, to make the thing more comfortable. A friend of mine gave me this tip and it really helps.

Now, this headband structure needed something tall on top of it, to reach the inside-top part of the eyeball. I guesstimated a height (7″) and cut out a rectangular piece of foam board to make into a cylinder that’s 7″ tall and 6″ wide. I crunched and rolled the foam board with my hands to make it into a tube shape. I cut out two 6″ circles of foam board and hot-glued the tube shape onto one of them. I left the other shape open at this point because I knew I might need to trim the tube a bit…

Now, how to set this cylinder onto the top of the headband thing? The headband thing was definitely not sturdy enough for that. So I measured and cut some foam board shapes and hot-glued them in place on the headband; basically two walls for the sides, and a flat “roof” for the top. I made the roof two layers of foam board so it would be nice and strong. I used a ton of hot glue to connect all this stuff. I also added a vertical structure at the back of the headband to connect to this roof.

I used masking tape to temporarily connect the 7″ cylinder on top of the headband structure, and I tried on the eyeball over that. It sat a bit too high, so I removed everthing, trimmed the cylinder a bit, tried it again, and it was fine. So at this point I hot-glued the other circle in place on top of the tube, and then I hot-glued the whole cylinder onto the roof of the headband thing.

Before gluing this structure into the eyeball, I wanted to spray paint it black; this might be overkill but I didn’t want people to be able to see the white foam in there (through the screen) while I’m wearing the mask. I used masking tape to protect the makeup pads and spray painted the whole thing.

Okay, time to permanently install the head structure thing. I set the eyeball upside-down on a large bowl, and I carefully determined the exact center (as close as I could) of the inside-top of the eyeball. I drew a big circle in there to use as a visual guide. I then put a bunch of Gorilla Glue on the top edge of the cylinder thing and set it inside the eyeball. Now, Gorilla Glue takes hours to set, so as soon as I set the cylinder down, I lifted it back out of there again — this was so I could see the ring of glue in the eyeball. I then poured a bunch more Gorilla Glue along that whole ring of glue; I really wanted this connection to be strong.

I set the cylinder and headband structure back in place on the ring of glue, and then I set a bunch of rocks in place inside the “roof” of the headband structure to weigh it down as the glue sets. Gorilla Glue expands a crazy amount as it sets, so it’s important to make sure the glue can’t push your pieces apart. So that’s what the rocks are for.

I let the glue set for about four hours before touching it; it can remain kind of sticky for up to about 12 hours, so it’s a good idea to just leave it alone for a whole day. Anyway, that did the trick; the whole wearable structure was firmly attached inside the eyeball.

Painting and last steps

The rest was easy! I spray painted the outside of the eyeball white. Before doing this, I taped some newspaper into the big front hole, to shield the wearable structure from the white paint.

(If I’d wanted to really go all out I could’ve applied a coat of Mod Podge before spray painting, to smooth out the surface a bit more.)

I then painted some veins by hand with red acrylic paint.

I cut out some pieces of white plastic mesh for the smaller holes; this stuff is much thicker than the screen door material I always use for the places where I need to see. I hot-glued these in place.

I then hot-glued the iris/pupil screen in place. I wanted to be very careful to keep the pupil centered, so I taped the screen in place first, made sure it was correct, and then hot-glued my way around as I removed the tape.

I made the little white circle highlights out of poster board, punched out with my various sized hole punches, and hot-glued in place.

This eyeball mask was much more echo-y inside than my other masks, due to the huge inner space and spherical shape. To kill the echo a bit, I hot-glued a lot of pieces of foam inside the mask. The main thing I did was take a 6′ foam insulation tube, slice it down the middle, and then cut it into a bunch of segments to glue into the mask. That helped a lot.

And with that, this thing was done! Oh yeah, and we were making two of these at the same time; they both came out great and they matched more or less perfectly. My wife’s head is a lot smaller than mine so of course we had to adjust everything for the head structure in her mask.

These eyeballs were relatively easy to do — just so much figuring-out of things along the way; so many little steps! I enjoy this kind of challenge, and we were very happy with how they came out.

Interested in commissioning a piece from me? Please see my page about custom paper maché pieces. Please email me; don't put your request in a comment below.

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