When Halloween rolled around I had been listening to Jonathan Coulton’s “Thing a Week” podcasts on endless loop, and being a code monkey myself the choice of a costume wasn’t hard to come by. Code Monkey. Very simple, man.

Found a Woochie “Ape Man” latex appliance from mostlydead.com. I preferred this over a lot of the other primate masks I found, because it looked more like a chimpanzee than most.

Since I’d be wearing the mask for several hours I needed strong adhesive, so I opted for Pros-Aide, which I ordered from FX Warehouse. The ears, hands, feet, hair and makeup came from Mangelsens, Halloween Express, and some other online retailers.

I painted the appliance using Pax paint, which is a mix of Pros-Aide adhesive and acrylic paint. A base coat of a fleshy pink color gave the mask and ears a nice foundation on which I layered multiple washes of tans, browns, and black. Since Pros-Aide is sticky when it dries I powdered the mask with a transparent power after the final coat. The ears were painted at the same time as the mask, using the same paints in an effort to make them match as closely as possible, but due to the mask being made of latex and the ears being made of less porous rubber the ears needed a few extra coats to get the colors close.

I prepped the pieces a few days in advance of when I was dressing up for work. I worked out the order of the work as best I could in advance, because I planned on coming home from work during lunch, which would only give me about an hour to apply everything. In the end it took about an hour and twenty minutes, part of which was figuring out the best way to do the theatrical hair color. The hair color was temporary and as such was kind of a clumpy, sticky fluid I had to work through my hair, taking longer than the 10 minutes I had allotted.

A recording of the application of the makeup (edited down to 12 minutes) is below.

Throughout the video you’ll notice it either does not show me applying the Pros-Aide prosthetic adhesive, or doesn’t show me drying it. For each part, adhesive was applied to my face and mask and dried with the hair dryer before adhering it.

Here are some additional photos taken by a coworker at my office.