Every tutorial in the archive is listed here, grouped by the technique it teaches rather than by the object it makes. That is deliberate. A bat and a spider are the same build; a skull and a face are the same build; a tombstone and an old sign are the same paint job. Learn the six methods below and the individual projects stop being recipes and start being examples.
1. Wire armature props
The foundation technique of the whole site. A straightened coathanger is cut, bent into a skeleton of the creature, and then dressed — with tape and plastic, with cheesecloth, or with foil and glue. It costs nothing, it takes any pose, and it survives a season outdoors. If you have never built a prop, start in this group.
- Bats — the reference build for the whole method, in three parts. A taped paper body, a hanger driven straight through it, wings bent from the same wire and skinned with cut plastic sheet.
- Cheap spiders — eight legs off a wire core, bodies bulked out with crumpled foil. Fifteen minutes each once you have the knack.
- Easy wire ghosts — a hanger bent into a floating figure and draped in cheesecloth. The single cheapest prop here, and the one that photographs best at night.
- Spectres — the ghost with a skull at the top of it, hung from an eyelet. Terrifying under a blacklight, trivial in daylight.
- Zombie arms — hands twisted from a single continuous wire, bulked with plastic bags and wrapped in tape. Best planted in a lawn among tombstones.
2. Hot-glue casting and skinning
Aluminium foil is pressed over an existing object to pick up its shape, skinned with a thin coat of hot glue to make it rigid, and then pulled off as a hollow shell. It is a mould-making technique with no mould, no release agent and no cure time, and it produces copies at a few cents each.
- Cheap skulls — four parts, the most thoroughly documented build in the archive. One bought skull becomes an unlimited supply.
- Face transplant — the same foil-and-glue shell taken off a face form, then ink-washed and stitched shut.
- Skin face — glue applied not as a sheet but as crossing threads, producing a translucent veined membrane rather than a solid shell.
3. Corpsing and rot texture
Turning something clean and plastic into something that looks like it has been in the ground. The method here is a single ply of cheap facial tissue laid into wet exterior wood glue, dried hard, then stained. It is the cheapest corpsing method in circulation and it needs no latex, no papier-mâché and no mould.
- Corpsification 101 — two parts. Rebuilding a cheap blow-moulded skeleton into a posable armature, then skinning it in tissue and wood glue and staining it.
- Zombie arms — the masking-tape variant of the same idea, which ages to a convincing yellow on its own.
4. Illusion props
Props that contain no sculpture at all and work purely on how the eye is fooled — by distortion, by forced viewing distance, or by parallax. Per hour of effort these are the highest return in the archive, and they are the projects people remember.
- Head in a jar — a flat printed face curved inside cheap glass. The most-linked project here.
- Haunted portrait — recessed eyes behind a cut-out painting, which appear to follow the viewer across a room. Two parts.
- Eyeball tube — a printed sheet rolled inside a clear storage tube, reading as a packed column of eyes.
- Alien specimen — a repainted doll suspended in tinted water. Weak alone, excellent as part of a shelf.
5. Lighting and glow effects
The cheapest possible upgrade to any prop already built. Ultraviolet and simulated flame both cost almost nothing and both transform a display after dark.
- Glowing potions — highlighter ink in water under a blacklight, which fluoresces far more brightly than any dye.
- Flame box — a box fan, a floodlight and a yard of costume fabric, producing convincing firelight. The most electrically involved build on the site and the one that needs the safety page read first.
6. Painting, carving and aged finishes
The finish is what makes everything above read at a distance. Almost every paint job on this site is the same move — a dark wash pushed into the recesses, then wiped back off the high points — and it works on bone, wood, foam and tissue alike.
- One dollar graves — dollar-store foam board carved, wire-brush textured and primed into passable stone.
- Spooky old signs — the dry-brush, don't-mix-the-paint technique that produces rotten weathered timber on new plywood.
- Cheap skulls, part 3 — white base, ink wash, off-white dry-brush, second wash. The definitive bone recipe here.
- Candy dish of death — a stacked-skull pedestal that combines the casting, gluing and painting methods into one finished piece.
Where to start
For a first build, make wire ghosts — an evening, almost no money, and it teaches the armature bend that most of the rest of this site assumes. For a first build that will genuinely startle someone, make head in a jar. For a first build you will still be using in ten years, make cheap skulls, because everything else here eventually needs a skull.
Before starting anything involving heat, blades, solvent or mains power — which is most of it — read the tools and safety page. It takes four minutes and it is the only page here that matters more than the projects.