Laureates Corner

I've decided I need to get into gear and make some tombstones for my Halloween display, but I don't want the same pun tombstones everyone else has, so I'm going to try something possibly a little different and use some people that were a hell of a lot more imaginative, creative and possibly crazier than I for inspiration. I was staring at my Edgar Allan Poe collection I bought at Barnes and Nobles (Yes it looks cool on my shelf with its golden pages and fancy shmancy possibly f aux leather binding, but it does come in useful other than looking awesome on my halloween bookshelf, )  and I started to remember all the cool slightly off kilter, dark and morbid stories I had fond memories of as a child when I use to read anything I could get my hands on, and I started to brainstorms of all the cool ideas I could come up for tombstones.

I started scouring my shelf for literary geniuses and I've come to the conclusion that I'm going to mimic Dave Lowe's zombie a month, but instead make a tombstone a month based off a poem, story, novel, or fairy tale.
With names like Poe, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Coleridge, Lovecraft, and Shakespeare, I'm definitely not short on said inspiration!

I'm not sure how I'm going to arrange this if I'll make a main head stone for each author and a couple smaller stones to represent literary works, or if I can just go full tilt on a large stone for each author focusing on one of their more popular pieces.. who knows!

I've been toying around this idea for awhile, but I haven't gotten a lot of shop time lately, and hopefully this gives me a kick in the arse to start getting busy on making anything!! I have three 4x8x2 sheets of pink foam sitting in the shed right now just waiting to be carved up! :)

I'm going to start my Laureates Corner off with Edgar Allan Poe, partly because I had this stone 85.97% completed for the longest time and it JUST happens to fit into the theme I have in mind :)  Here it is finally FINISHED!

I definitely want to elaborate on some more Poe stones.. Maybe a tell tale heart stone that has a prop beating heart, or mimicking a heart using a red bulb that beats in sync with music.. I also have a bunch of Poe's stories narrated by the one and only Vincent Price, so that may be cool to work in somehow too! 

I have a lot of ideas brewing in my head which doesn't happen too much, so I'm excited about seeing what I can come up with :) I think next I may try and do something Pirate related with Samuel Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner as a basis :) I've already said too much! ARRRR! 

I was hoping to find a cool date in Poe's life to correlate with his tombstone being made for the month of July, but alas I haven't had any luck, so I may not even go in  the correct order of months :) It would be kind of neat to list a couple of interesting facts about the authors and why I chose them, so hopefully the reasons get deeper than oh I've been wanting to finish that stone for months! :) 

Be that word our sign of parting!

The Nightmare Before Graduation!

Here is an awesome project I finished as a graduation present for someone who likes The Nightmare Before Christmas as much as me! :) This is for a friends daughter and it started out when my Girlfriend bought her a bunch of Nightmare Before Christmas bows for her hair. All the bows needed a container, so the wheels started turning and I decided to make a toe pincher coffin jewelery box and further elaborated on the Nightmare theme with a hand painted  box to hold everything in. The box turned out to be almost a small trunk, lol! Needless to say her eyes lit up when I carried the box into the house and it was awesome seeing her reaction, and I know this will be a cherished gift that can't be purchased anywhere! :)

The size and cost of the jewlery box wasn't that much, so I'm thinking about making several more of them and seeing if I can sell them to my girfriend's friends who also have insane hair bow collections, although some of them may need full size coffins for all their bows, but I can do that too :)

The box and coffin were both made out of plywood and painted with acrylic craft paint. I used a paint marker to draw the swirls and it's a ton easier than trying to use a paint brush to draw the lines in my opinion! :) The skulls were also cut out of plywood. I made a Nightmare box likes this for my girlfriend last year for Christmas, and I am really digging them as a storage box. I think I'm going to make a set using different "wrapping paper" designs. Who says function can't look good :) 

The Slaughtered Lamb

Here is a project I have been wanting to make for some time. It is for the coolest guy I know as a thanks for introducing me to the things I enjoy most. From Star Wars to the Night of the Living dead and everything in between, I was lucky enough to have someone passionate about film, music and art introduce me to a lot of stuff I had been previously sheltered from. From my first copy of the Star Wars Trilogy (on a VHS tape), seeing George Lucas interviewed in person, meeting Ralph Mc Quarrie in PERSON (awesome), first viewing of Night of the Living Dead, and a slew of other Horror movies that I love, John Scoleri was there sharing his passion for film with me and boy did it rub off! 

Mr. Scoleri appropriately runs a theater out of his house called the Slaughtered Lamb Cinema. The name is taken from a Pub from An American Werewolf in London, and I thought it would make a neat project and a one of a kind gift for someone that would appreciate one of my hobbies :) The box resembles an antique silverware container that housed a silver serving set, but the "cool" goodies are hidden underneath the false bottom. On the inside it contains a werewolf killing kit of sorts. A gun, a silver bullet mold, bullets, and some vials to hold liquid mercury or silver.

Cursed Jack Sparrow

I've been working on finishing up my Helmsman as of late and I decided to get a Jack Sparrow costume for the threads! I was going to rip up some old clothes and make the clothes look really ratty, but I figured I'd order a cheap Pirate costume and do the same thing to it instead! I've yet to stain the bucky, or the clothes, but I plan on doing so! I still need to work on the mustache because it is bothering me!!

Skull is using a Scary Terry designed servo and the Helm and Wheel were made by yours truly :) The wheel is turning using a monster guts wiper motor and power pack to control the speed! I currently have a picoVOLT coming in that will record a two minute routine that will make the movement not so monotonous!

I like everything about the project thus far, but I'm kinda disappointed over the quality of the costume. I was going to be really cheap and just by the bare bones Sparrow costume, but instead opted for the "Prestige" Jack Sparrow costume and it is pretty cheap! I'm not going to feel bad about aging it and cutting some holes, but for the price I'd never buy it again! It was manufactured by a company called Disguise.

I plan on making a treasure chest, some signs, and hopefully my next major project will be a couple of cannons that light up, make noise, and shoot fog all manually :)