Another year and more stuff made. No carved pumpkins this year, but I did make a couple of large paper-mache pumpkins (very time consuming!). Also made some paper skulls and a new half-skeleton.
Yet another mod to the “Mad Monk” prop. I had found a paper model for a skull, and enlarged it to twice normal size. The full-size skull came out OK, but the 2x skull was pretty floppy despite using heavy card-stock … it needed some sort of internal bracing that I simply didn’t have the time to add.
Here’s the new & improved Mad Monk 2. The head was changed to yet another paper-model thing, and the green pumpkin is actually an old paper-mache pumpkin re-painted and with toothpick fangs added. I also added some “internal organs” to the monk, since the burlap robe is somewhat transparent.
This is what the ensemble looked like. Note the “heads on a stick” (old heads displayed in a new way), last year’s quick&dirty wobbly-things, and a couple of store-bought skull ornaments. I painted the skull ornaments to make ’em look more like stone, and painted the eye-sockets green.
A new skeleton. The bones are rolled-up newspaper, and the whole thing was quickly assembled using a cloths-hanger for the spine and duct-tape to hold it all together. Of course the clothshanger was simply to flimsy once the head was added (I tested it with no head), so at the last minute I added a piece of wood for the spine and quickly added some white paint. Hence the white paint on the grass. The paper-mache head is a re-worked old one … new fangs and a new paint-job. Fangs do seem to add something to a pumpkin!
Here’s what the porch looked like. Yes, the skull ornaments are tacked on with black tape.
A close-up of the LHS of the porch. The large pumpkin head is a new paper-mache creation.
And the RHS of the porch. Yet another new paper-mache pumpkin.
Here’s a group picture of the paper-mache pumpkins. The two large ones on the right are new, and the two on the left are re-worked older ones. The large ones, by the way, were made using a new process that I stumbled across. The form is made by filling a plastic bag with wadded-up newspaper, then tied&taped to form the shape. Then strips of newspaper are wetted with glue and the form covered with a couple of layers. Let dry and repeat. And repeat. And repeat. It gets pretty tedious! But it takes many layers to make a reasonably rigid piece, especially with those larger sizes.