Halloween portraits and centerpieces

Big Halloween party for our daughter and her friends on the horizon. After some discussion with my daughter it was decided I would paint a vampire portrait for above the fireplace and I would create a centerpiece for the food table. This centerpiece would take the form of a miniature, haunted graveyard.

Below is the portrait. I haven’t painted on canvas in maybe 10 years. I mean a complete painting. I kept looking for the undo button. I started off wanting to do a serious portrait, then decided it should be super cartoony. That proved too cartoony so I did this. Something in-between.

click to make biggerer

The centerpiece was a lot more work and I will post final shots of that some other time. But I made most of the elements out of Sculpey, baked them and painted them. There will be an old well and dry ice will be in there to add some Oregon like weather conditions. Below is an almost finished overview.

The Ghoul in the tree is a gauze and latex wrapped body with a wire structure so I could pose it. The base is good old plaster and the tree is a series of cutting from a bush i cut from the yard this summer but liked the miniature look of it. I had it handy. The box ‘base’ will be surrounded by black cloth once it’s brought to the dining room and placed on the table.

There is a ‘digger’ on the one side as well.

It was fun to work on this. Like working in stop motion again, but nothing had to actually be super stable and built to last. Just well enough constructed so  that it looks good. I got to use up lots of old boxes, cardboard pieces, and extra paints.

I’ll post some larger pictures in my Flickr gallery to the right on this blog.

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