A Birthday Bust

What better way to say happy birthday to a friend than by immortalizing her in an original work of art? And I use the term "art" rather loosely here.

When good friend Anna Marie had a birthday approaching, my pal Lee and I decided that the best way to show her we care would be to make a paper mache sculpture of her head.


The nascent stages

 Neither of us knew exactly how to do this, so we turned to the internet for some help. We watched this tutorial video.

Notable things in the video include:
-The timeless quote, "Paper mache has a lot of great uses."
-The accent of the guy in the video
-The tiny spoon he uses to stir the big vat of glop
-The fact that such a video exists.

We found the recipe to be too complicated and decided to rely on a vague memory Lee had from elementary school in which she dumped some glue and some water in a bowl. We then ripped about 9,000 more strips of newspaper than we ended up needing.

We began to sculpt and then paint. Every afternoon or evening that we went to work on it, the movie Freedom Writers happened to be on t.v. and so we have now seen it about six times.

We put the final product in a t-shirt because it just seemed inappropriate not to.


The final product far exceeded
our wild expectations.

 Finally, it was time to present the birthday girl with her present. We knocked on her apartment door and held up her head so that she would be greeted by herself when she answered the door. We were envisioning clapping, jumping up and down, immense gratitude, and overall approval.

When she opened the door, she took one look at it, made a face, and then asked "Who is that?" She eventually warmed up to the idea, but it took her a while to take it all in. Her lack of spectacular enthusiasm didn't stop her from posing with her present for a picture.


Striking resemblance! (kind of)

 Success!