This gave the eyes a nice spooky flickering effect. One last thing, I poked small holes in the skull’s eye sockets and inserted two battery powered tealight candles behind them, with the fake flames sticking out. We got the idea to set up an oscillating fan behind the grim reaper in order to have the lightweight fabric blow and billow a bit this worked great! For the hands, I attached fishing line to the hands and ran that up to the hooks in the ceiling, and adjusted the length to have the hands hang at the height I wanted. I hung the head on a hook by the little loop. I installed three small hooks in the ceiling one for the head and one for each hand. I used this loop to hang the skeleton on the ceiling. I twisted a tiny loop into the top of the wire head, and pushed it through the fabric so it stuck out the top. Since my paper maché skull was just the face, and not a whole head, I used the wire to make a sort of round 3d head shape that could wear the skull as a mask and have the hood fit over it nicely. I used strong, flexible wire to make a long, wide shape that would serve as the arms, shoulders, and head. Anyway, I cut and stapled the fabric to make a simple cloak and hood shape. Nowadays I mostly use cheap plastic table cloths from the dollar store for this kind of thing that’s definitely the cheapest (but flimsiest!) material you can get for covering big areas. I bought the cheapest and lightest-weight black fabric I could find at the fabric store. With the face and hands done, it was time to work on the body. This was a more primitive version of my usual painting process for my big paper maché skull masks and whatnot. When that was dry, I dry-brushed them white. I took the skull face and skeleton hands outside and spray painted them black. I was able to peel the paper maché completely away from the aluminum pan and masking tape, which was great I was left with an extremely lightweight paper maché skull face. When all of this was dry, I used scissors to cut away the excess aluminum and paper maché from the skull face. Then I paper maché’d over the whole thing with Elmer’s and paper towels just two layers. I rolled up newspaper and paper towels for each of the finger bones and hand bones and taped them all in place. I then made the teeth of wadded up aluminum foil and paper maché’d over them, and the glue in the paper maché held them in place.įor the hands, I first cut out big poster board hand shapes, and then taped pieces of bendable wire onto them from the wrist to fingertips, and bent them into gnarled skeletal hand shapes. Small dollar store skull decoration and twenty-dollar bill shown for scale, and to prove that I have twenty bucks.Īnyway, I did two layers of paper maché for the face. I’m really glad I discovered Roman PRO-543 universal wallpaper adhesive (paid link) a couple projects later it’s way easier to work with and dries stronger than Elmer’s glue. Then I started paper machéing I used watered-down Elmer’s glue (which works, but I really don’t prefer it), and paper towels rather than my usual newspaper and craft paper. I attached all this stuff with masking tape. I then used wadded and rolled paper towels to build up the eyebrow ridges and outer nose shape. I was able to create decent shapes for the eye sockets and cheekbones and not much else, but this was a good enough starting place. I then molded this into a rough skull shape with my hands basically bending and twisting it into a big skull-shaped aluminum mask. I bought a big disposable aluminum foil pan - like you’d use for a turkey or whatever - at the dollar store. I had not yet figured out my preferred paper maché method at this time so I made this stuff a little differently. I started with the skull face and skeleton hands.

Grim reaper halloween wallpaper