I have 3 kids and like to do themes for Halloween and my son chose Mike Wazowski from Monster’s Inc. So the plan became Connor (3yrs old) would be Mike, Taylor (5yrs old) would be Celia and MacKenzie (2yrs old) would be “Boo”.
For the Homemade Mike Wazowski From Monster’s Inc. Costume, my Mom took a large exercise ball and used a homemade papier-mâché recipe she found online and put about 3 layers on the ball. You have to make sure that you give it enough time to dry between each layer. When she gave the ball back to me it was time to do the sculptural part of the costume. I needed to make the eyelid stick out and I wanted to add dimension to the cheeks. I had to bring the mouth out quite a bit in order to be able to make the teeth and the tongue look right.
I used a papier-mâché pulp recipe. Basically you do all the same things as you would the regular papier-mâché except you boil the newspaper until it breaks down and then let it sit in the water overnight. If you are going to boil it make sure that you stir it because even though it is in water it can still burn, trust me! You need to exaggerate it a bit because after you are done with this stage you will be adding another layer of the smooth papier-mâché and things look much less dramatic after you do that.
Allow yourself enough drying time because it will take quite a long time to completely dry out. I had to use a hair dryer to help it along. Once you have a layer of smooth papier-mâché then you can start to paint. The color is important to get right if you really want it to look like Mike. I used Acrylic paint. I put a base coat of white on first so that the newspaper wouldn’t show through and then I used Craft Smart brand Citron Acrylic paint.
I painted two coats so that it was smooth and you couldn’t see any white through it. I took cardboard and formed the horns and pushed them through holes to make the horns. Originally I was going to try to make it so that my son’s face would come out the front enough so that we would paint his face to look like the eyeball that didn’t work. You could see his whole body through the hole and he would have to contort himself to try to get his face out the hole.
I had to find a solution. I found a mixing bowl that I had in my cabinet that not only fit perfect, but it was the correct shape. I used a small screwdriver and hammer to punch out the center of the bottom of the mixing bowl. I sanded the opening so that there were no sharp edges. I painted it to look like Mike’s eye. We bought fabric to make pants and sleeves to match. It was in the upper 70’s so I didn’t want him to be overheated so we left the shirt off and just painted his arms green with green and yellow face paint.
My mom whip stitched the green fabric to an old pair of his sweatpants and we painted his face black so that it acted as the pupil of Mike’s eye. He loved it and was pretty much the hit of the neighborhood!
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