Product design: Festival masks!

Product design: Festival masks


For my product, I designed a pair of paper masks that would be given out at festivals and live performances. I went with an 'Alice in Wonderland' theme for my masks because SBTRKT's album title, 'Wonder were we land' sounded like a play on the word 'wonderland' to me.

My two masks are based on the two characters, The Cheshire Cat and The Queen of Hearts. I drew both of them digitally.


Cheshire Cat mask


The first mask, The Cheshire Cat, was designed with a South American/Aztec influence in mind.

I chose to use a bright, warm colour palette and solid, geometric shapes for this mask in reference to the warm colours and shapes used in South American art.

I added no shading to the mask and only coloured with a flat paint texture brush and chalk brush to make the mask look slightly like a painted wall mural. 

I used a lot of bright, simple shapes to decorate the mask which made it look a little like a piñata animal to give it a fun, festival look.

Queen of Hearts mask

For my Queen of Hearts mask, I chose to give it the appearance of a Viennese carnival mask, something which I thought would fit in a festival environment but also have a regal, royal look representing the character of the queen of hearts.

I was originally going to make the base colour of the mask a powder blue colour to contrast the red/yellow colours of the cheshire cat mask but I decided against it after I thought pink and red suited the character better.

I used a speckle brush and a white charcoal brush to high light the mask while adding dark pink shading around the eyes and some of the edges to give the impression of a ceramic mask. I also drew some thin crackle lines on the pink base of the mask to replicate the faint cracks you would see on the white porcelain parts of a Viennese mask.

I drew the finished facial expression of the mask as a sneer instead of a slightly happy neutral expression that you would see on most Viennese masks.