We have often heard it said that imitation is the highest form of flattery. Well, in this case I hope that Dave Lowe is flattered. John came across a photo of one of Dave’s set designs that included a tombstone that hints at a skull shape, and decided it was a really fun concept. Construction of said tombstone was very straight forward over all. We used 3 layers of pink insulating foam sandwiched together to get the desired thickness for the tombstone. We next sketched out the general outer shape. Doing your initial sketch in sharpie is probably not the smartest choice in the world, but these are Halloween tombstones, and there’s a lot of room for forgiveness and improvisation during the build. The most important thing is to get your overall size right.
Something that is often overlooked that you should consider during the design and build process is the expected viewing distance for your audience. If you are adding tons of fine detail to your prop and it is only going to be viewed from 10 feet away, that work is lost. In our case the display is meant to be viewed from the road, so features need to be larger in order to be seen. What we tend to do during the rough design for a tombstone is to sketch it out on a piece of foam or cardboard then stand that up against a garbage can in the garage door entrance then walk to the street. If the important parts of the design are hard to see, then things either need to be larger, or details have to be exaggerated using other techniques, like paint, or lighting.
Once the over all sketch was to our liking we took the router and carved out the front details. In the case of this tombstone where there are three different depths things can get a bit challenging if you don’t have a CNC router. (We don’t) We started out with routing out the mouth first, then did the RIP lettering, followed by the eyes. We then went back over and carved out the inset area. We did have to use a few scrap pieces of foam to keep the router level once things stated getting caved out more. If you look closely you can see when that didn’t quite work out. 🙂
Once the face was carved out, we used a hot knife to cut slots into the center piece of foam. The slots are used to insert lengths of CPVC used to slide the tombstone over fiberglass driveway markers in the yard. Pro Tip: make yourself a template board (a length of old 2×4 works great) and decided on your spacing for your stakes. We have 2 spacings we use, a more narrow spacing, used for tombstones that are more vertical in nature, and a wider spacing for the wide tombstones. Use this spacing on all of your tombstones. that way you can drive in your support stakes using the template board, then drop on the tombstones later. You can also randomly change placement of the tombstones if you want to mix things up during the season.
We next glued the 3 foam pieces together using Gorilla White glue. This glue requires moisture to activate / cure so after roughing the foam panels up, we misted them lightly with a spay bottle then applied the glue. You can also use expanding foam like great stuff, but our experience has been that tends to be way to messy. Another alternative is construction adhesive, however that does not cut as easily with the hot knife. Once the glue cured we cut out the overall tombstone shape using the hot knife.
Next up we mixed up a batch of “Monster Mud”. If you are unfamiliar, monster mud is a mixture of drywall compound and paint. Go to your local big box hardware store and look for mis-tint paint cans of a stone like color. As far as how to mix the mud there are a lot of videos on Youtube that give you details, we recommend looking at some of those. We then coated the whole project in a couple of coats of monster mud and let that set up. If you don’t want to mix monster mud, DryLock masonry sealant works well as well.
While the mud hardened John took to the electronics workbench to rig up the candles that would set in the eyes. The two candles were pretty straight forward, he added a couple long bolts out the side of each candle to allow them to mount securely to the tombstone, and soldered some thin wires and a couple of resistors in place of the battery compartment to allow the candles to be powered externally.
After the multiple coats of Monster Mud dried completely we painted the mouth and eye areas solid black to make sure they “popped” from a distance, then using a bit of a dark grey we painted in the cracks, and the lettering. We next dry brushed the whole thing with a a little dark grey paint to highlight some of the texture.
After the paint dried and we applied a couple of coats of clear coat finish to seal everything. John was able to drill holes from the front of the eyes through to the back of the tombstone and insert the candles and route the wires through to the back. A large fender washer keeps the nut from pulling back through the foam, and a touch of lock tight keeps the nuts from coming loose. We then took hot glue and drizzled it down the candles and the face of the tombstone to look like melted wax.
At this point we thought we were done and put the tombstone out for the evening. Unfortunately the candles did not provide enough light to make the tombstone fully visible.
Time for some “sympathetic lighting”. Sympathetic lighting describes lighting design that harmonizes with its surroundings, basically it seems like it belongs there. In this case we wanted something that looks yellowish and would be easy to hide the source. John had some small amber LED marker lights in his parts bin, and stuck one inside a small piece of 1/2″ electrical conduit, and wired it up with a decent length cable to the power supply for the candles. Presto, we had a custom built spotlight for the tombstone that was easy to hide and provided just the right amount of light that the candles were still visible as candles, and the rest of the tombstone appeared to be lit by the light from the candles.
This video was shot before we added the sympathetic lighting. The light shining on the tombstone is from the Haunted Shovel and every time the shovel passed in front of its spotlight, this tombstone would become too dark to see the details.