Fast

For this weeks Illustration Friday subject "Fast" I could only think of the classic Tortise n' the Hare, and here's a take on it that I doodled a bit ago!

Frozen

This weeks Illustration Friday subject is "Frozen" and since I had the fun of reinstalling my OS after a system freeze...this little girls angst toward her frozen mp3 player felt just right!

"Flying"

Submitted to Illustration Friday.....the topic for this week
(October 16) is "Flying".

Vector drawn in Flash (a totally different animal than Illustrator!).

This should be the first of many "IF" posts!

Halloween Cemetery

Well, it's October again and I've spent the last week huddled in my garage, upgrading my Halloween Graveyard by adding a creepy fence with flaming skull topped stone columns! It looks pretty awesome (if I do say so myself!).....and I wanna share how I did it!

Last year while tearing down the seasonal decorations I decided that adding a cemetery fence around the front yard would be all kinds of fun and I could probably just use pvc pipe from the hardware store to do it, so this year I made it happen.

The Fence:
The fence turned out better than I expected. I thought that using pvc would work so I headed to the Home Depot and got about six pieces of it (1/2" diameter 10 feet long/about $1.20 each) My yard is elevated above the sidewalk so I didn't need to make a tall fence....that saved on material. The fence is about two and a half to three feet tall. To make the pvc look like a wrought iron fence I also picked up a few eight foot lengths of 1 1/2" x 3/4" lumber (just over a buck each).
Once bringing the materials home, I cut the pvc down into 2.5 foot lengths (4 each) and then drilled holes with a wood boring bit that allowed for the pvc to slide through. Now to make the fence look a bit more wicked, I decided that it needed cool finials..but how? I had some Super Sculpey which is a polymer clay that can be baked in the oven, but I didn't want to sculpt a hundred clay pyramids. So while perusing the Halloween inventory at various stores, I found little plastic skulls sold in bags of nine at the dollar stores, Sweet! So I sculpted a dozen clay pyramids, combined them with the plastic skulls added a little adhesive and "Viola!" a pretty cool lookin' fence!
To give it a more eerie Halloween look, I then took out my propane torch and heated the pvc and added some random bends. Disclaimer!!! I really don't know if breathing in burning pvc fumes is at all safe, so please, if you try this, use breathing protection and only do it in a well ventilated area!! Also, by slowly heating the pipe it can be bent easily, heating too fast does cause burning and toxic lookin' smoke!
To finish the fence off, some primer and flat black spray paint, nice. It may look a little too new as my fiancé pointed out, so she got her hands dirty and wiped on small amounts of an old brown paint that we had lying around....cool..rust!


The Columns:
I've got a cool lookin' fence, so what now?!?.......Well, I've always wanted to try to make fake stone outta construction grade insulation foam....I've known how to do it, but never tried, so why not try now!
I ran back to the Home Depot and grabbed a sheet of 1/2" thick rigid foam insulation (the pink stuff) ...a full sheet was about $9.00. After getting home, I framed out a couple wooden boxes, one foot square by three feet high. Then I simply glued the foam on the outside of my "columns"....now for the experiment. I know that you can carve this stuff, so I grabbed some clay sculpting tools and began scraping away at the foam. I left an area on the face of the columns alone so it made for a smooth area that numbers or words could be carved into (I ended up leaving them blank) This was fun, easy and incredibly messy!
To complete the stone look I simply sponge painted the finished pieces after spraying them with standard grey primer. To do the sponge painting, I used a sea sponge and two shades of grey latex paint. And to age them a bit, I loosly slapped on some stain and let it run.

It's really fun making things that look better the messier you work!

The Column Caps (Flaming Skulls):
While creating the columns, I was thinking of how to finish them off......I could just create sturdy tops out of plywood....that would allow for a place to put some jack-o-lanterns...And then the idea of lanterns got me thinking about making actual lanterns...but how? Then it came to me as I looked around the garage looking for inspiration........
I love bargin hunting, and I hate paying top dollar for cheesy Halloween decorations (partly why I like to make my own!)...but what I will do, is keep an eye out for the cool decorations and wait til the holiday passes to try to buy them on clearance. Last year I grabbed five foam skulls for five bucks. (originally they where marked five dollars each). So here's the idea.....
......we have a bunch of Tiki torches that we use around the yard and for camping, and with that comes the canisters that hold the wick and oil, and they're the perfect size for inserting inside the skulls!! So, I took two skulls, marked out the center and cut holes in the top and bottom just large enough to fit the canisters into snugly. (it helped a great deal that the foam skulls are hollow). I then made the plywood caps, glued the skulls in the center and painted the caps the same way I painted the columns, so they'd match perfectly.

So that's the project for this year, we'll see what happens next year....already got a few ideas!