Progress?

OK, progress. Now that the leather has dried for a couple of days, the "languettes" that held the leather onto the matrix are shaved down to paper-thinness with a very sharp blade, and the matrix is removed.
A stainless steel wire is glued around the inside perimeter and the languettes are then glued around it to hold it in place and hide it.



The languette dangling from the end of the nose is also shaved down (an excruciating process, with no margin for error); eyes are cut and the mask receives its base color of dye:


It still needs a patina layer over the dye, a mustache and eyebrows, and some varnish on the inside, but finally, it can be tried on... (psych, I don't have a photo of this! Sorry!)

Anyways, it doesn't fit.

The perimeter line of the forehead and temples is cut wrong, and the whole cavity of the eye socket needs to be cut deeper. The result is that the mask sits too far forward on my face, my actual eyes are more than an inch behind the eye holes, and the whole thing points downward slightly. So I will have to go back and work on the matrix some more. This is par for the course.

This particular piece of leather is kind of a mess; I didn't set the leather properly on the matrix to get the shape of the nose or eye sockets right, the tip of the nose is a mess, and there are lots of places where I scratched the leather with my fingernails or with various tools. So it's an acceptable first draft, and a good learning experience, but it's not a very good mask.

Yet.