Awesome Homemade Jack Skellington Costume

My 2010 costume is a Homemade Jack Skellington Costume. I knew from the start I would need more height because I am only 5’7″ so I purchased some sports stilts. From there, I used pipe insulation (similar to pool noodles) to build the basic structure of the arms and legs. The arms and legs were then covered with long sleeves that I made out of solid black fabric.

To make a chest that would double as a mask, I started with a single cardboard box and reshaped it by cutting out parts and re-taping it together until I got the desired “heart” shape with a face hole in the front. The face hole was covered with cross-stitch material and then the whole thing was covered using a child’s suit. I topped it off with a bow-tie made form cardboard and clay. The hands were fairly simple to make: just took long zip-ties and covered then with sections of clay to resemble bones then attached the hands to a black par of gloves and connected the glove fingers to the bone fingers with fishing line.

The head was the complicated part. I started by covering a ball with paper-mache. Then I popped the ball and crushed the remaining sphere into what resembled ET’s head. Using that as the base, I built up clay to make Jack’s signature brow and nose. Once that dried I paper-mached again and cut the eyes out. Using more clay, I build concave eyes inside the head which gave the eyes a much deeper look. Here I also cut the entire head along the mouth line in order to open Jack’s mouth and to help with building the eyes.

Everything was paper-mached back together and painted. I made some yellow teeth out of clay and glued them into the mouth. Using left-over pipe insulation covered in white duct tape, I created a neck to attach the head to the body. White stripes were painted along the entire suit and the costume was done. The legs and pants attach to me via a cord around the back of my neck. The top half then goes over my head and my arms are placed into slits mid-way down the suit’s sleeves.