Halloween Mummy

Since our Halloween Theme last year was Mummies I needed a mummy in front. I did have some grand plans which didn't pan out, too busy creating a new training title for How To Gurus, so had to fall back on plan B. My backup plan was to go and buy a skeleton from a Halloween store and dress it up as a mummy. The best I could find was a 5 foot tall plastic skeleton that wasn't too realistic, but it would have to do. Next came a white sheet, that was torn into strips, died using tea bags, then tied around the skeleton. Voila, instant mummy!

Halloween Mummy

Since the Mummy was only 5 feet tall I attached him to a stand (you can see it behind him as a black pole). He was then placed behind a bush so that I could raise him up to 6 feet and keep his floating feet hidden from view. Our yard has lots of bushes and not much open space so we have to place props around where we can.

Just barely noticeable in this photo are two of the LED multicolored lights that are designed for inside pumpkins and make great outdoor lighting as well. They are sitting on top of the bush right in front of the mummy and in the dark they are totally invisible. These two are aimed at the Mummy and give a really spooky lighting effect as they slowly change from one color to the next. I will be doing a post on these great little lights later as I describe this years layout.

Also take a look at the pumpkin in the front, small and a little green on one side. This is one of the pumpkins from our backyard Halloween pumpkin patch. We used the good ones by the front door and put the rest around the yard.

This picture also shows the plastic light up pumpkins that we use every year, we have 7 or 8 of these and they are great for filling in those dark corners around the yard and putting next to tombstones. You can always find these at Target, KMart, and Walmart every year.

Secret Room

Every Egyptian tomb needs a secret room, so we put in a little Indiana Jones action for ours. This is placed below the table containing the main Halloween Mummy Village and is lit with miniature Christmas Village spot lights. Making these Halloween dioramas look good is all about the lighting. This one has two lights, one aimed at the left wall and one at the floor, the rest of the lighting is simply spill from these two spots, very effective when viewed at night. The light on the wall also lights up Indy as you can see from his shadow on the wall (rope and arm).

 The floor and walls are made out of foam core with flooring and wallpaper printed from images found online. The columns likewise are made of foam core rolled into tubes and then covered with with a column like wallpaper found online. Indy and the Ark of the Covenant are toys, purchased at Disney's California Adventure at a toy store right in the front of the park which has a big Indy section, good reason for a day at Disney! With park admission for me and my wife, plus food and of course Indy, this little display cost over $200, but it was a fun day. If you cut out the Disney trip you could make one for a lot less, Indy toys are all over eBay. The snakes are from Target, they were originally bright yellow glow in the dark and were simply painted using a Sharpie black marker. The Obelisk on the left is a paper model found online (I did a BIG search for Egyptian Paper Models on Google, pretty much used everything I found). The two Egyptian God statues are paper models from Paper-Replika.com , lots of great paper models on this site if you like making your own stuff.

The whole thing was simply taped to the bottom of the Halloween Village table using black duct tape, some black duct tape was also used to create "curtains" to hide the miniature spot lights in the top corners. Colored duct tape is a key construction technique I use in both the miniature villages and outside, with Black and Camo being my two favorites.

New Home for my Halloween Projects

Hi, this is the new home for my Halloween projects. Every year we dress up our yard for Halloween, and to keep things interesting we choose a different theme each year. The last two years we had an Alien Invasion, and Mummies. Along with our usual front yard display we also set up a "Halloween Village" in our front window. This is like a traditional Christmas Village, but with a Halloween Theme. And of course the theme matches the yard theme.

Last year we added a new element to our Halloween by putting a pumpkin patch in the back yard and we grew our own pumpkins, just seemed appropriate. This year we are doing the same, although on a smaller scale as the pumpkin patch has become a vegetable garden as well.

I am starting off this blog with a look at our previous Halloweens, I will follow that with a detailed look at the preparations and constructions of this year's Halloween. This year's theme is a Ghostbusters Haunted Street, combining Ghostbusters stuff with Ghosts of course and more traditional trick or treaters. The Halloween Village contains 8 Haunted Houses, most of which were built using free paper models available online (more info later), a great Ecto-mobile, the Stay Puff Marshmallow Man (paper model of course), the Statue of Liberty, and lots of other surprises (some paper models, some purchased stuff, some reused from previous year's displays. More info on all of this in later posts.

Part of Egypt Halloween Village with lighting

Egypt Halloween Village using Flash

Here are two pictures from last years Halloween Village, Egypt Mummies. Best viewed with the spooky lighting. The large pyramid is a purchased prop, there are several purchased mummies plus a couple paper models. The Sphinx is a paper model from Canon Creative Park. There is a Star Gate paper model, several Paper Model Pyramids and Obelisks, some Paper Model palm trees and assorted other stuff. It all really comes alive with the lighting. We use miniature village lights and some great color changing LED lighting that was designed to go inside pumpkins.

This years Ghostbusters theme will be far more advanced.
More later..