Now I know why Silver Surfer is always showing a sad face.

Today I tried again to combine art and photography. What you see here is an aluminum foil face mask. No Photoshopping except a bit of levels, contrast and cropping. I started by pressing an aluminum foil on my face to get the basic shape. I tried with more than one layer of foil but that failed. Aluminum is not same as latex they use in Mission Impossible - it doesn't stretch. One layer you can still ply to your face, but more you have, harder it is unless your face is rock hard. Mine is not. Forehead is easy (for me), but for the rest it was easier to take it off the face and finish the job with fingers. Human hands are amazing! They can pump iron and handle the aluminum foil. Yes, I can really put this job on the list of super sensitive activities human hands do. Whole mask would fold on its own, but with gentle persuasion, it was shaped to have more visible eyebrows, lips, better defined nose... I didn't want to show real details - just main form with look of "The Thing" from Fantastic Four.
Talking about F4, why did I mention sadness of Silver Surfer at the beginning? Because of all expressions I tried to convey through my limited experiments in this media - sad face was the one that came most naturally. I have no idea why. Maybe my mood was not appropriate?

Photography element here was challenging as well. One soft box provided all the light I needed - soft enough not to render everything black and white, and strong enough to show all the contrast it needs. I wanted dark background, but my son took away my nice black fleece I used before, so I settled for a green background that I could easily change later. Once the mask was ready for pictures I had to hold in in front of the camera (which was on tripod), lift and flip the camera's display so I can see it while in front of it, and use a remote control to snap the shot. It worked well, until I decided to try B/W mode in my camera. It can do better job than PC, because it takes multiple shots to create nice gray shades. Unfortunately this mode doesn't support remote control, so I had to call Jerrin to help me and press the button for me. :)