Happy Halloween!

I have been in love with Halloween since I was a kid.  I'm not sure why.  I think, though, that it's as simple as this: I liked the color palette better than other holidays. Purple, orange, green and black were fun colors and I liked all the monsters!  I still love the old black and white monster movies to this day.
A number of years ago I had the good fortune to meet a guy named Jeff Carlson who loves all this stuff as much as I do. I think we knew pretty quickly that we were on the same spook page.
Jeff was already on another level when it came to Halloween. He was sculpting his own masks and doing all kinds of cool monster related art.  I picked his brain until it bled and he got me hooked on some of the basics for mask making.  I bought some clay, a head armature, some Ultracal and latex and set about getting my hands dirty.
Sculpture scared me from the start. Not because it was hard, but because I seemed to get lost in it.  I spent hours sculpting and had no idea how much time had passed.
I decided that my first attempt would be something I thought was really cool and not as common as other Halloween masks.  Dracula is well known...but I had decided to try my hand at doing a re-sculpt of a really great Nosferatu mask that I found pictures of on the internet.  It's a blatant copy, but I thought that if I could make a decent replica of it, it would be good practice.  I had a great time, never knowing that it would eventually be a step toward the things I'm doing now.
I sculpted the face, mixed Utracal (a tough dental plaster) and made a 2 piece head mold...embedding some plaster bandage material in the plaster for strength.  The I pulled it apart, removed the clay and poured latex into the cavity of the mold (it's called a slush mold because you slush around the latex to get into all the crevices).
 After letting it cure a bit (the plaster pulls moister from the latex and forms a skin). I emptied the remaining latex and let it cure some more.  I pulled out my first (and what would be my last) latex mask from the mold.  I didn't immediately make more casts, but instead began painting the first.  Eventually, an accident would destroy the mold before I could make more copies.  The only pull, though, has survived and gets hauled out every halloween to decorate our house or my shop.
Many things have changed since then, but my love of Halloween, sculpture and all things that go bump in the night has remained.  The skills I started developing then have also heavily influenced what I'm doing now. 
For that, I thank Jeff and wish him a Happy Halloween!