Hot Rod 2 — Matt Fagan Art

Getting a Big Head

The character of Hot Rod - an alien race-car driving dog from another dimension - was created for my Halloween costume seven years ago. I loved that costume, and I had longed for an excuse to be Hot Rod again.

Well, now I have an art show scheduled for 2027, and one of the things that I want to display in that show is my Hot Rod costume (because Hot Rod also features prominently in several paintings). I bought a mannequin to display him on, and then promptly knocked the head off and broke the original mask.

Of course, breaking the mask was devastating. But it reinforced (or maybe just forced) my other idea, which was to make a new, more dramatic mask out of carved foam; one which would be much lighter, and easier to display on a mannequin.

So this year, I focused my Halloween efforts on reinventing Hot Rod as a carved foam head - and of course I made a few upgrades to the rest of the costume, along the way.

Learning Curve

While I had some limited experience carving foam, this mask was a completely different process. All of my various failures and recoveries are documented in the Instructable, which is a fun resource if you want to know what I did wrong. But some stuff also went right, and I don’t want to bore you with the details here. The important thing is that, by the week of Halloween 2025, the Hot Rod costume was in pretty great shape!

The mask looked great, and I was almost done.

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