Halloween was approaching, now I’m not one for celebrating american traditions, but I’ve been invited to a few parties so needed to come up with something. Somehow the idea of a blowfly seemed appealing as I’d never seen a mask like that before, and making something with large compound eyes seemed like a blast.

The design only took a few hours. it was made from primitives in Autodesk123D then taken to Meshmixer for textures, hollowing and smoothing. If you haven’t used Meshmixer it’s almost like a 3D pain program that allows you to build, smooth, subtract and texture basic models.

Printing was very straight forward with supports used for the face/nose section but not for the eyes. I was in a bit of a rush so printed them at 80mm/s at 0.2mm layer heights.

The sections were then melted into position from behind with a hot soldering iron and the gaps filled with epoxy glue. It was then a matter of painting everything black with water based acrylic paints. After the black had dried I applied a coat of deep red using a sponge, the idea here was that the groves between the bumps on the eyes would stay dark. I then applied some purple (the only reddish colour I had) pearlescent paint over the surface with a sponge to give it that glint.

The fur on the face was a little tricky. I had a piece of black fake fur from an off-cuts bin, so i chopped the fibers from the backing and attached them to the face using a thick layer of black acrylic paint, once I was happy with the effect I sprayed over it with fixative to keep it all in place. The fur around the edges was simply a strip of feather trim from the sewing shop hot glued on, and the whiskers are made of necklace string.

The wings were simple enough to design, I simply found some macro images of fly wings through google images, touched them up in Photoshop, converted them into vectors using illustrator, then exported them as .dxf files, expanded them in Fusion360, then smoothed and manipulated them in mesh mixer.

each wing is printed in 3 pieces, a white wing sandwiched between two sets of black wing veins. I simply epoxy glued the veins onto the wings and using black acrylic paint covered the edges of the wings where the layers were visible.

The two finished wings are then epoxy glued into a center piece which I covered with fur using the same method as the mask.

I made the mounting plate as a separate piece that screwed onto the wing assembly so that it could be easily replaced if broken. The elastics are just flat 12mm elastics which are stitched into position. I used a small bag clip scaled to 45% which I’d downloaded from thingiverse to join the elastics, but I realized afterwards that the clips weren’t needed as there was plenty of stretch for me to get my arms through it.

The costume turned out pretty well, and I even won a prize for my efforts

As always the mask STL files.

And the wing STL files.