Halloween 2020: Obelisk and base are assembled and partly painted

I’ve made decent progress on the obelisk since the last time I posted progress. The first image is the obelisk base fully assembled, having been aged with a knife, sandpaper, scissors, and a rasp and textured using a fine orange peel wall texture. It’s ready to be painted with a nice sandstone-looking paint my wife helped pick out.

The second image below is the same base, resting on its side after 2 1/2 coats of paint on the sides. The back and right side (facing down) need to get their third coat of paint, and the top and bottom still need three coats as well.

It’s amazing how much paint XPS foam (which is a vapor barrier) sucks up. Two coats definitely doesn’t cut it.

The last image is the obelisk stone after being fully assembled, patched with lightweight spakle, and sanded smooth with 320 grit sandpaper. It’s now ready for me to mark out a 8′ 3″ long spiral down it’s entire length so I can rip a crack out of it into which I will glue my red electroluminescent (EL) wire from Adafruit (it was a Christmas present from my son – thanks, kiddo!). At the same time I’m going to mark locations for several plastic skulls that I cut the back off and painted a very flat black except for the eye socket and nose so that the EL wire will make the skulls glow faintly red.

The skulls aren’t pictured, but I’m really looking forward to this. It seems a shame to rip apart the obelisk like this after getting it to look so pretty, but I needed the pretty first because it’ll be a high gloss near-black paint to look polished except for the crack and the EL wire in it.

FYI, I use Adafruit when I’m doing stuff with lighting like EL wire, EL patches, full-color LEDs, and the like. They take stands on social issues that I agree with and they’re the best when it comes to do-it-yourself lights that I’ve found so far.