Doktor the Galactic Plague Doctor

Character Conception

I have no idea how I didn’t learn about plague doctors at school.  They are so creepy and cool they should be on the history syllabus for every child!  They love this stuff.  The first time I saw one was not that long ago.  I saw a couple of pieces of artwork of an almost steam punk version of a plague doctor.  The shape of the mask and the gasmask like lenses really struck a chord with me and got my brain working.

The idea popped into my head that what if there were plague doctors on a galactic scale.  If a planet is infected then these guys appear mysteriously out of nowhere, land on the planet and help with the dying and contain the disease.  I wanted them to have a pretty alien view on life so they tend to do this by mass “culling” of the population until the disease is no more.

Costume Design

I sketched the concept and it seemed to work pretty well.  The thing was that I really wanted to make this costume myself.  So far I’d been making clothing for my costumes and the heads I was commissioning.  I knew that the mask would be made of rubber and I wanted lighting and possible sound built into it as well.  The clothing would be simple black robes.  Your typical grim reaper stuff.  The hands would be gloves with metal claws to add to make it less human like.

Mask Making

The first thing was to sculpt the mask.  I’d never done sculpting in my life but armed with a polyurethane bust and 10kg of oil-based clay (like Plasticine) I set to work and after a few hours I had a pretty good representation of what I wanted to the mask to look like.  Two more smoothing passes later and the mask was ready to go!

The next step was to make a cast of the mask in plaster.  This is where I really struggled.  My first attempt was a disaster!  It totally destroyed the sculpt and so I tried on a smaller mask a couple more times before I got a successful cast.  Once I’d resculpted the mask from scratch I was ready to cast again and this time it was a success, hurrah!

Once I had the cast I could make a latex copy of the sculpt by the slush casting technique which worked a treat first time.

With the rubber copy all nicely cured I then turned to acrylic paints (Liquitex) to paint it.  I used the same methods I used to use to paint lead miniatures, painting a black base coat and then dry brushing silver to make it look like beaten up metal.

The lenses were cut from smoked plexiglass using a fret saw and shaped with a SurForm and glued in with some contact adhesive.  Straps were added with the same glue and holes punched into the underside to allow me to breathe.

Still to come…

As this costume is still under construction the rest is still to be written!