Thread: Simple blacklight enhancements for 99 Cent Ghost

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Here's a picture of some enhancements in progress, designed to take a 99 Cents Store hanging head and shoulders prop and make it into something nice enough to showcase.



MAKING THE SHOULDERS MORE POSEABLE... This prop is a vacu-formed plastic face with vinyl fabric made into a kind of shroud, tattered on the bottom. It is designed to hang from a loop of cord coming out of the head/hood. The shoulders had nothing supporting them underneath and just tended to hang there. So, I took some thin wire from the hardware store, doubled it over a few times until it was thick enough to uphold the vinyl fabric, and made a "V" at about the midpoint. The "V" was created to be a kind of tab that could be hot-glued into the chin area of the inside of the face mask. Once the center part of the wire was secured (i.e., once the glue was cooled) I was able to arrange the wire on either side of the "V" so that it would support either shoulder. The wire was glued under the fabric, again with hot glue. Now the shoulders could be posed. This helps the flimsy prop resemble a real standing figure.

PAINTING ENHANCEMENTS... The prop had a sort of dull, gray paint job on the face that looked like it would be difficult to light. Why not put a blacklight paint job on the whole thing? First I took some fluorescent blue tempera paint and mixed it with matte acrylic medium. About two parts paint to one part medium. This makes an acrylic paint that you can build up in layers if you like. The face seemed like it would not take the paint, so I sprayed the face lightly with spray glue and let that dry until the next day. Then, I highlighted the face with acrylic paint, white, on a small rubber sponge. When this was dry, the blacklight blue was then applied over the white. This was stippled on with a sponge in two thin layers. I kept the whole thing under the blacklight so I could see what it would look like. Wow, the color really popped!

When the face was mostly done, I applied the white acrylic and then the blacklight blue to the fabric of the "costume." It took the paint fairly well so I did not prime the surface with the spray glue.

that looks really great! I like it

Nice! You took what was basically junk and made it into something cool.

Great job and good for turning tacky props from some stores into awesome props like this

Thanks

Phil

Thank you for the kind words...!

Quite often we do not have the time and money to do something "expensive" and sometimes low-budget ingenuity is all we can rely upon. This sort of blacklight paint effect can be applied to most any cheesy prop. You'll want to make sure that the prop's surface is something that the paint will stick to in the first place--in this case, the "77" spray-glue applied to the face was a crucial step because the shiny, smooth surface of the face would not have let the paint stick without that layer of sticky rubber. The acrylic paint sticks to the spray glue layer very nicely.

Mixing the acrylic medium (art supply stores) with tempera paint is a good quick way to give the tempera an acrylic "binder." This allows you to paint multiple layers of this paint (allowing drying time between layers) and you can thus build it up to the desired thickness/intensity. It also makes the paint more or less waterproof!

I didn't need to mix a huge amount of paint to do this, by the way. I maybe used an ounce of blue fluorescent tempera paint and half an ounce of acrylic medium--mixed together on a disposable styrofoam plate. I just dipped a small foam rubber makeup sponge (99 Cents Store) into the paint puddle and then stippled the paint into the prop. Nothing simpler!

(Notice that spray glue is often used to prime blucky skeletons so that tissue paper and latex will adhere to them properly--a lot of times, cheap props are made of oily plastics that won't let you paint them or glue anything to them.)

Great Result! The glue is a nice trick.

I've been collecting skulls - plastic and foam - for a long time. I want to build a full wall of skulls. This tip is exactly what I needed.

Thanks much!

Here's a photo of the back of the prop, and you can see how thin the whole thing really is. That's the fun of this item to me--it is small and simple and lightweight, but if you light it right and place it right, it can be very dramatic and scary!



This version of the photo just shows where the wire was hot-glued in, to support the shoulders. I made sure to glue the "V" in the center to the inside of the mask (in the bottom of the chin) because this would tie the whole thing into one structure. If the head is hanging securely and everything is balanced, the shoulders will seem nice and solid.

As you can see from the first picture at the top of the thread, it is all about how it "looks" instead of about how strong or solid the prop actually is. It is very compact and will pack away easily after the Halloween festivities!

Great job looks awesome!

Thats incentive enough alone to stop passing on every junk prop I see. I learned how to turn blow molded junk skeletons into decent corpses here last year. Thanks for the cool tip.