Having Practical Lighting in your Halloween Village helps to create that fantasy realism that I strive for. By Practical Halloween Village Lighting I am referring to the street lights, lights in trees, lights beside paths and so forth. Most of these lighting effects I picked up at different stores during the Christmas Holiday season in their Christmas Village sections (Michaels Arts and Crafts is a good example, link on the left). But some of the lighting is specific to Halloween. Take a look at this photo from our 2008 Alien Invasion Halloween Village display.
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| 2008 Halloween Village showing practical lighting |
On the left are two lines of lights (3 lights in each) in front of the haunted house, these are illuminated skulls that came from a Halloween store. Just in front of that are two lights on a gate, the gate was a paper model from Ray Kiem (
Haunted Dimensions), a gate from the Haunted Mansion in Disneyland. I added two old fashioned street lamp posts to the top of the gate, the lamps are from the Christmas Village section of Kmart. To the right and left of the haunted house are two more of the street lamps. Around the cemetery in the center of the picture is a fence that included lamps, also from the Christmas Village store. All of these lights run off of either batteries or can be plugged into AC adapters (the way I use them). At the back (top) of the picture and just barely visible in this image is a gnarly tree with orange pumpkin lights, looking kind of light miniature Japanese lanterns. This is simply a battery operated pumpkin necklace that I have draped over the tree. The rest of the lighting in the picture comes from the LED Pumpkin lights (link at right) and of course the miniature fogger in the swamp (
Ultrasonic Mist Maker).
