Since we are doing a Ghostbusters theme, and a Ghostbuster made a cameo appearance in the Casper movie, I thought it appropriate that we have a Casper as part of our decorations. Since Casper is a cartoon, having him as a cutout made sense. This was an easy project, here is the finished display (leaning against my door):
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| Finished Casper |
This started out as a blank house for sale sign that I purchased at Lowes Hardware for $6.
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| Blank Plastic Yard Sign |
These yard signs are made out of corrugated plastic, like corrugated cardboard from boxes, but plastic. Size 24 inches by 20 inches, with a metal stand that slides up into the corrugated plastic.
Next I found a picture of Casper by doing a Google search, then scaled that up using InDesign CS4 to the size I needed. I chose InDesign because it has a nice tiling feature letting you print a large picture on several smaller sized pieces of paper (like this large blowup printed onto letter sized paper).
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| Original image, partially done enlargement |
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| Here is the blowup from InDesign, took 8 sheets of paper |
I traced the blowup onto the plastic sign and then outlined the lines using a Sharpie marker. I outlined them because they needed to go thick to thin to look like cartoon ink work. Most of the lines were thin near the ends and thick in the middle. After the outline I simply filled in between the lines with the Sharpie.
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| You can see the traced pencil lines around the face, the outlines around the body, and the beginning of the filled in lines on the head. |
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| Outlining finished, working on filling in |
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Once the marker work was done I marked around the image using a compass and pencil to give me a guide to cut out the image. I decided to leave a 1/4 inch around the figure so that it retained the cartoon look. Then I cut out the image using an exacto blade. Total time about 2 hours for the project.
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| Marking guide lines around the image |
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| One more time, the finished cutout image, about 2 feet across, attached to metal stand. |
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Once we get our outside display up, 1 week before Halloween, I will put up a picture of Casper in his "Final Resting Place".
