To make the wildebeest I used thin white foam board that I got from DollarTree. It's pretty thin (hey, it's cheap!). You can buy the thicker stuff from your craft or office supply store but you'll pay a lot more. I used a light projector to trace out the shape onto poster board. That served as my template. You could use regular paper but the poster board holds up better as a template and its thicker edge makes it a bit easier to trace around onto the foam board. I also made sure to trace out the facial features onto my template. My wildebeest is about 17" high (just the face) and about 10" wide from cheek to cheek. The tips of the horns side to side are about 17" wide. You can make your wildebeest as large or small as you want. The foam board was then cut out with an X-acto knife. Sometimes the white paper covering the foam board will come up on the edges, and you can glue it down with hot glue. Save some of the long pieces of leftover foam board...you'll use it to make the back handle.
I took my template and used carbon paper under it to trace out the face onto all the foam wildebeest heads. That way all the heads were consistently the same design and also easy to paint with the design "drawn" in. I painted the heads using 3 different metallic paint colors: Dark Brown, Copper and Venetian Gold (any dark gold will do). To get the copper circles on the face, I used a dime and traced out the circle onto a piece of craft foam. I cut out that circle and then hot glued the circle onto the flat bottom of a sharpie marker, thus creating a "rubber stamp" of the circle. I dipped the circle into the copper and stamped it on. Practice a few times with it first to get the results you want.
Once the mask was painted and dry, I hot glued raffia onto the back to make the hairs.
Then I took the leftover foam board and cut out strips that were 10" long by about 1.5 inches wide. I just bent and hot glued it onto the back in the shape of a handle. I did 2" on the first bend, then 1" on the bend going up, then 5" for the curved handle part. The actors will carry the heads like a shield.
