Halloween 2020 – headstone complete, obelisk under construction

Everyone needs a sanity break sometimes, and we can’t face dark days if we don’t take care of ourselves too. So here’s some photos of what I’ve been working on for Halloween 2020.

As of this morning when the second color of aging paint was dry, Athena’s headstone is officially done. I aged with a dirty brown mixed with water to make it really runny and then again with a dark reddish color. I think I may leave the next one at just the brown, or do the two colors in reverse order because the red overwhelms the brown.

But still, it looks nice to me, and I don’t think I will need to accent the letters to make it readable, especially since I tend to light my Halloween scenes.

About the only thing I might (might) still do is put little dabs of fluorescent paint in the eyes of the owl so they glow a faint green. We’ll see.

Anubis’ (Anpu’s) obelisk is well under construction at this point. I’ve shaped the peak of the obelisk and cut out the details for the base (not in the picture), glued the two lowest pieces of the base together (and caulked/glued the rough edge to make it look nicer), and have started assembling what I’m calling “the cube” (at right, clamped and weighted). This is the piece that sits on top of the base at left and will have a capstone on top of it. Put all together they’re the entire base.

Unfortunately, I’ve discovered that not having a table top drill press made drilling 7/8″ holes messy. The holes you see aren’t quite aligned with the lower peice, so I’ll need to buy some Good Stuff or something to fill the holes when I put the PVC in it. The pipe is 1/2″ PVC to go over rebar that will help keep the decorations from flying off in the strong winds we get in my neighborhood.

One of the things I learned is that dowel pins are a huge help to keep things more or less aligned and Gorilla Glue is tricky when used over large areas. I glued the piece labeled “DL” on the left to the piece below it but once the Gorilla Glue started foaming up, it slid because it was only weighted, not weighted and clamped or dowel pinned. I won’t make that mistake again

I also had a very detailed plan to do mitered corners and dowel pins and the like on the cube, but decided that was going to be much too hard for my current skill level. So I did things with dowel pins and glue and, at this point, it’s going quite well. The barbells are because I needed more weight than a 5 gallon bucket of paint would provide. I’m hoping to have the cube fully assembled soon, although I think I’m going to be pausing to drill the PVC pipe holes in an interior support brace (made of foam, of course) first.