Oct. 4, 2007

Been working on the LOR. It is awesome.  The show is far more impressive than I can describe here.  Once everything is set  up I will post a video to YouTube and you can see it for yourself.  Here are picures of the basic elements.

  Pic #1 is the stand I made to mount the          Pic #2 is my Show computer.  An old HP pavilion

  LOR box.  I made it large enough to add         with a 19in monitor.  It runs Win ME and has no

  3 more boxes as time goes on.                         problem with the LOR software.

  Here's the Chorus.  I got the more orange pumkins at Target and the larger yellow/orange pumkins from Wal-Mart.  The three smaller pumpkins were bought at Michaels and carved.  I then got the electric light bulbs from Wal-Mart and they light up just fine!  I also got some varying colored bulbs to put into the pumpkins to give each some personality.

Sept 13, 2007

I wanted a bit more decor on the gravestones so I took some scrap styrofoam drew pictures on them and cut them out with a dremel.  I glued them onto the wood like I did the edges.  One thing that I found out about the adhesive.  It wants to eat the foam.  If you want to use it, the apply sparingly, It will work.  If you apply too much, you will eat away too much foam and the decoration will fall off.  I then painted the stones.  I had left over paint laying around, so I mixed a yellowish paint with black paint to make a gray.  I painted the stones the gray first then added more black and highlighted areas, added more black and streaked down from the cracks and edges.  Added more black then painted the cracks with a small amount of streaking.  Then I took a sponge and dabbed a small amount of Light yellow gray and the dark gray on  it.  Bent it around a few times to mix the colors on the sponge and streaked the whole gravestone.  It made for an excellent weathering effect.  I then painted my epitaph's on them. 

Here's a couple of freebies that I made out of the scrap foam that came from the inside of the frames.

Sept 7, 2007

Cut out the styrofoam and glued it to the wood. 

Last year was the first year that I decided to decorate for Halloween.  While I enjoyed doing it, I really didn't go all out for the decoration.  This time I wanted to really decorate for Halloween.  The reason is simple.  I just got my new Light-O-Rama and want to really get to know it before the big Christmas opening.  So I have been working on my Halloween sequences along with my Christmas sequences.  Now, what is a front yard decoration without a graveyard?  I first set about to building some gravestones for my Haunted Graveyard.  I had some scrap wood left over from building my storage shed so I decided to use that.  I sketched out the gravestones and then cut them out.  Here they are:

You can see that pink board behind them.  It is a foam board.  I will be using that to give the stones some depth.

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