Display Eyes for Masks/Busts

Jparr3085 · September 17

Here's an easy way to make quick, cheap eyes for your predator busts/masks. Minus the bake time for the clay, these eyes were assembled in less than 15 minutes. Hope you enjoy it!

You'll need:

Sculpey oven bake clay (translucent)
Glass cabochons
Quick dry top coat nail polish
Orange/red yarn
Colored pupils printed out on paper

I found that using the translucent Sculpey gave the eyes a nice color for the final product, but you can use any oven bake clay depending on what style of eyes you're going for. The possibilities are endless since you can change up the pupil color/size to fit whatever predator/creature you want.

The same goes for the glass cabochons. I picked up an assorted size pack for this project so I have lots of options for future versions.

Then yarn for veins... I went with a reddish orange color, but you could go straight red, orange, or any other shade.

First step, I cut off a few chunks of clay and shaped them into balls, somewhere around an inch/25mm.

Then I took one of the glass cabochons and inserted into the clay eyes to make small impressions.

Then it was into the oven to bake my eyes! Sculpey has the baking instructions on the package so just follow that, but these took about 35-40 minutes at 275 degrees Fahrenheit.

Once the eyes were done and cooling, I cut out my pupils. For the pupils, I just went online and found plenty of fascinating eye color variations that seemed fitting and printed those on a piece of paper in various sizes to scale it to what I needed to fit the glass cabochons, then reprinted it so they were all the right size.

Now, taking your quick dry clear polish, dab a bit onto the pupil area and use that as glue to place the paper in the indented spot. Then add another dab of glue to the glass piece and place it over top.

You'll then take your yarn and shred it into wispy pieces and coat the eyeball with more top coat nail polish. Lay the pieces of yarn onto eyes to achieve the veins and add more polish over top to glue them in place. The quick dry formula allows the stuff to seal everything quicker than having to rely on various glues or varnish.

And once they're all coated they'll look something like this...

Mine came out a little sloppier since I was trying to film the process with one hand while doing most of this with the other to make these so the next batch should be even better, but either way, not bad for something that took less than 15 minutes of actual work and a few bucks as an alternative version to the more expensive display eyes out there.

And here's what they look like thrown into the first P2 mask I ever painted. I think they bring a whole other level of realism to a great sculpt by Gene Frechette Jr.

Along with the video tutorial as well... https://www.instagram.com/reel/DABV-jNP8Sv/?igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==