Our first serious Halloween endeavour

**Bryan316** · 10-23-2009,08:52 AM

Allright, this is more of a teaser, because we don't have everything set up. Most likely Sunday. But I've got six more tombstones to add moss and rain streaks and black mold to paint on.

Quick list of our intentions:

Floating Lantern (mobile assembly, American DJ disco ball motor base M-103, fiberglass rods and heavy pipe counterweights, LED battery candle modified to fit lantern, 1/8" nylon-coated steel cable from house peak to tree)

16 foam tombstones, including a celtic cross, an obelisk, and three lightbox tombstones with plastic to diffuse the light and soften the glow so it's just a creepy amount of light around the cemetery

Fog chiller made with a garbage can and 16 feet of rigid ducting corkscrewed inside, which already works awesome even without any ice in there yet

Open vault with sides, to have a skeleton rising out of

Broken vault with a crushed lid all cracked inwards

Gonna take a quick picture as a teaser, will be back in a few minutes.

**Bryan316** · 10-23-2009,09:09 AM

Okay, here's the celtic cross. It's rather..... large. Heh heh! If we find time, we'll be hiding four red LED's behind the skull to glow outwards from behind it, partially lighting up the knotwork. And if my buddy can figure it out, we'll make it glowing from dark to bright nice and slow and creepy.

**MonsterBoss** · 10-23-2009,11:09 AM

HOLY COW!!! That thing rocks!

**Curlgoddess** · 10-23-2009,12:22 PM

WOW!!! AWESOME WORK! Very impressive!

**StanFam3** · 10-23-2009,12:31 PM

WOW... now THAT'S a tombstone!!! Can't wait to see your other pics.

**Bryan316** · 10-26-2009,11:24 AM

ALLRIGHT. A good set of pics. However, need to snag summore tonight of the fog rolling across the ground, and the lightbox tombstones giving the yard an eerie glow.

First off, mid-construction of the cross and the obelisk.

Yes, we actually broke the obelisk into two pieces. We had to, to glue in the pipe inside to connect the base! Then there's a pipe glued to the base, to stick inside the pipe in the obelisk. Then we just Great Stuff'd the two pieces back together with some internal bracing, and went CRAZY with the paint to make it look ancient. When we set it up, we have a 6-foot piece of 1/2" rebar, hammered into the ground, and running up inside both pipes. It was quite sturdy last night.

Anyone know where that symbol comes from in this cross?

We needed a bag of sand to level the obelisk. Next year, we'll have a mix of mulch and dirt ready for this stuff.

I juuuuust discovered the brown blanket method of making a fresh grave. If I have time, I'll tweak this one.

**Bryan316** · 10-26-2009,11:32 AM

We'll do the glowing skull for next year.

My two favorites this year. I love the tilting stone idea, and spent a lot of time detailing the Crowley stone's lettering to look sinister.

I think I got a bit cheesy with the moss. But I liked how the base turned out. I need more refrences for bases to make them more foreboding and luxurious looking.

My oldest tombstone, and one of the lightbox tombstones. I dunno how I got the lettering to look like that for Lovecraft's name, it just came to me as I was melting the foam. Now I wanna make a font to look like this!

Two more lightboxes. My friend demanded I make him a STUPID one. Heh heh! Instead of cutting the letters into the stones, I used the masking method. Stenciled, brushed on some latex gray, then spray painted over to reveal the letters. I wanna use this method more often, it looks waaaaay ancient.

And the yard, and me trying to figure out where best to place the fog chiller. We're thinking of ideas to run short flat ducting across the yard to really spread out the fog. Yeah, we're ambitious.

Gotta get photos of our floating lantern. We'll try at twilight, so this goofy camera can get the glow of the candle, yet not get washed out by the flash. I'll tweak the shutter speed and maybe half-block the flash.

Next year's additions will really get ambitious. I want a tombstone popping up, I want a fully fenced-in yard, I want torches and gargoyles and ravens and TONS of spider webs. My first attempt at a web shooter isn't working too well, so I'll spend the rest of the afternoon tweaking to see if I can get it right.

Right now... it's SAMMICH TIME! With yellow peppers.