As well as drawing airbrush art, I also make costumes sometimes. This one was created over one weekend and three evenings in August 2008.

This HAL 9000 (from 2001: A Space Odyssey) costume was created for the Heroes and Villains of the Silver Screen ball. Having enjoyed being an inanimate object at the previous party, the idea of being the most sinister inanimate film character of all really appealed.

The costume is constructed from black foam board, the transparent plastic packaging from a 99p shop Mickey Mouse 'ush light', some Revell silver and metallic black model paint, some WireForm aluminium 1.58mm contour mesh painted metallic black, some epoxy resin (which attaches everything on the front but failed to hold the sides on), some trusty silver and later black gaffer tape, a Duracell LED forehead torch (which luckily had a separately switched central red LED) mostly covered in black insulating tape, a piece of foam to protect the ridge of my nose, a pair of black tights around my neck and over my head, a colour laser printed logo (colours adjusted to be more readable when not lit by Stanley Kubrick) stuck on with glue stick, a pair of thin tight one size fits all ladies black gloves, and a cut up sponge used to keep the whole thing sitting straight on my shoulders.

Not one straight line on this costume is actually straight, some are extremely wonky or became bowed while I was gluing them on. If you take into account that I can't reliably draw a straight line with a pencil and ruler, now imagine this with a craft knife and 1.5cm thick foam board...

I spent absolutely ages perfecting the voice and memorising all the lines. Unfortunately I found that in practice, one is not awfully audible when at a party with a mask completely obscuring all lip patterns. If I ever reprise this costume at a sci-fi convention, I think I'll bring a small programmable scrolling LED (red, of course) display with me to close caption everything I say. I'm sure my deaf friends would be appreciative.

This particular photo was taken at Orbital 2008 which was only a couple of days after Arthur C Clarke died, so it seemed apt to bring back the costume as a tribute.

I actually had to airbrush out from this photo a piece of very visible gaffer tape that had come undone, and the head literally fell to pieces a little later on, however this is the best picture I had -- this costume did NOT look good under camera flash -- the board and glue behind the grill and lens were not visible to the eye.

Disclaimer: I do not own Hal 9000 or 2001: A Space Odyssey, this was intended purely as a fan made fancy dress costume used for non-commercial purposes.