How To Make A Spooky Tree / No Clay Or Wires / Halloween Candy Bowl Built In

welcome back to my channel where the gnomes live this is Sharon Ojala today I'm going to show you how I made this fantastical tree there's a fantastical thing about this guy as anybody can make one you don't need any special supplies there's no clay and there's no wires needed he's pretty old-school for me he's made pretty much the exact same way I made my very first tree in 2013 when I had no idea what I was doing and I just wanted to replicate mark I was trying to make something for my little gnome at the time so and this is this technique I've used many times over the years I have since started using clay and you can make the basic format add clay to it but that's not in this video in this video I'm going to show you how to make this bark without using clay at all you'll need basic supplies to build your tree to build the tree form I used aluminum foil masking tape glue any glue is gonna work a tacky glue or white glue Mod Podge even would worked and a cheap paper towel you don't want any real thick paper towel if you find yourself at home and you only have thick paper towel to work with you can separate the layers I'm also going to show you how to paint the tree in this video and I used craft acrylic paint in black, cinnamon brown, burnt umber, and beige and to get his eyes all aglow I use tissue paper you can use any color I like using the yellow because they glow really well with the yellow but you can use red orange white any color will do I use the tea light I get these at the dollar store and a pencil comes in handy one with an eraser on the end you can see I also added some moss and just a couple of leaves the leaves I got from an arrangement I found in the thrift store I paid about $2 for the whole arrangement and I just use pieces off of that when I need it and the boss I gathered at my parents property but you can find moss in Walmart, craft stores, or Dollar Stores and to attach the moss I used a tacky glue the regular white glue will work as well I found tacky glue grabs really fast and once it's on there it's stuck on pretty good alright my friends let's get started I'm making this tree in the video and to make this basic form right here I started off with about 6 feet of tinfoil let's get started alright guys the first step I take is I make a form like this and to get that form that's the base form for the tree and then we're going to build around that to get that I roll out about six feet of tinfoil and then I fold it in half so there's about three maybe three and a quarter feet it you don't have to be precise you just want a nice chunk of tinfoil to work with and now I'm going to roll this up but I'm going to roll it up in a way that I get this little hollow piece on the top so let's do that together before I do that I want to show you a little bit of the design of the tree so here's the hole in the back of the head where I stick my tea light and that's what makes the eyes glow so to get this little hollow bit on top I work it into the tinfoil as I'm rolling it so here's what I just did you can see a big hole there now you don't have to do it this way I just found this step a little bit easier than having to dig it out after so I'm gonna show you what I mean here I'm gonna roll this up and remember it's a crooked haunted tree does not be perfect but I'm gonna roll it up with my hands here so I'm gonna be rolling around my hand keep my hand in there so I create a little Bowl as I'm rolling so I'm gonna turn the volume down because it's a horrible sound and let's get rolling there we go we have a little bull on top and then the bottom here I'm going to squish into the table to get a flat bottom so that's this is the base and then we're going to build up around this tree so now we want to make a little spot for our face where's our face going to be so I'm going to put one right here and then the back of it's going to have a hole for the tea light so I'm just gonna make a hole in the back of this now and you can actually just work it with your fingers so put my tea light in there so there's the start I'm going to actually put tape around that now so I can keep that shape okay so now I know that's where my tea lights gonna go in the face I'm going to worry about after I'm not gonna do that right now because while I'm building the form it's just gonna keep getting messed up so I'm gonna leave the face until after okay so now I want to decide where my arms are gonna go I got about a foot of tinfoil here and I'm just gonna squish it up so there's the beginning of my one arm and I have this bottom flat open so I can have a bigger area to tape to the tree it we're gonna start with that I'm going to take that on there I'm going to build the hands on there after I'm done the trunk of the tree here so I want to build onto the trunk now now the wonderful thing about tinfoil building is you can change the mind at any time you're not stuck with any one design ever so you can try out something if you don't like it then you can just remove it and or cut it away and try something else I'm not sure if I'm totally done with this trunk yet but it's looking pretty good so I'm going to cover it all of it with masking tape yes I got one layer of masking tape around the whole trunk and now I'm gonna work a little bit on the inside here give it a little bit more stability because it's pretty flimsy right now especially where I put the tea light into so what I want to do is build up the area around the tea light from the inside strip of tin foil and I rolled it up into a roll like this and now I'm going to put it around that tea light on the inside and that will build up some of that strength around there so let's do that I'm framing that tea light hole that's what I'm doing from the inside that gives it a lot more stability inside there let's get a piece of tape in there to hold it in place and then I can see what else I need to add to it okay so let's see I'm squishing it around the light with my thumb pushing it in towards the light itself creates a little nest for it yeah that's great right there so now I'm going to add my tape there we go that's perfect fit okay I just want to add one more layer inside here behind the face but it's a piece of tinfoil this is where I'm gonna fold it up and I'm gonna fold it again and now I'm going to lay this inside there push it into place now I will put masking tape over the whole thing okay so all covered in there before I work on the face I want to add my branches and I had to do it off camera the first time because I kind of forgot how I did this and trying to figure out the easiest way for you guys I just take a piece of tinfoil and I folded it and I'm going to squish it up the one part and I'm going to wrap it around the end I'm going to add a piece of tape just to make sure it stays put the number of fingers is totally up to you I just start off by making little slits all right guys now remember when you're doing this part is gonna feel a little bit weird because the middle two are going to be very very flimsy but remember you can build onto tinfoil and it starts off flimsy but it ends up pretty sturdy and I'm going to squish them together and what I did here was I created a space right here for another finger and now I can add to the length of them but before I do anything else I'm just going to make them more stable with some tape so I just make some narrow strips and I go right through the middle of two fingers and I do that for every single one of them so there's the base of the hand now you can add to every individual finger you can filled it up I stuck a piece of tinfoil rolled it over and now I'm going to place it on over top and create that first finger okay so over here I have a branch that I don't like so I'm just going to remove it fix the wound with some tape and I'm going to add a branch over here on the side oh yeah much happier with that so I'm going to take it in place so now all I have to do is cover all the fingers with tape so you want to cover the fingers completely with your tape and what if you have this lay it over top the finger and just push it all into place we need to strengthen up this floppy branch here and I'd already done this one and all it is is just adding more tinfoil and I'm going to add a bit of bulk down here to hold it up so when you put your masking tape on this part you want to go across the tree and not with the branch you want to go against the grain so to speak just adds a bit more stability to the branch you want to wrap it this way so I think he's looking pretty spooky and I'm I'm pretty happy with his shape and everything the last thing I'm gonna do before I move on to the next step is if I wanted to add any more little details like adding little bumps like this I'm going to do that right now and all I do is just take little bits of tinfoil like these branches here I want to have some knuckles there make it look a little bit more creepy so I'll just put little bunches of the tinfoil wherever I want the bumps to go so I'll go ahead and do that and then we'll come back and see what we got look at how creepy that looks now with those added bumps on there I love that all these little extra little details really will add to the finished look of the piece look at how creepy that looks that actually looks like a spider awesome and then I filled in you'll notice a little bit in here and behind added a little bit more bulk behind here all right I think it's safe to say I can't draw but after it's all done it looks okay okay so I'm just gonna cut these out okay so that looks pretty good so now what I'm gonna do is get some tape into that exposed foil in there okay I'm gonna lay it on the side and then I'm gonna use my pencil to push it in and cover up that foil so I used my pencil and the dull side of my knife to make little more details listed in there and then push it down to make a bit more of elongated mouth and this side too they used a dull end or side sorry and the back inside you want to make sure that this is all covered with masking tape as well because we are going to be gluing inside of here so we can't glue the tin foil we have to make sure that you put in your masking tape back here alright guys now we're gonna create the top of the head and I put a little Bowl in there there's two reasons for that one is to block off the light from the from the top so the tea light shows more from behind if it was wide open on top you wouldn't be able to see the light as well flickering behind there so that just blocks the light from escaping and the other reason is it can also hold a tea light on top or anything else that you want to display or it could hold candy too right so you want to think about these things while you're designing do you want to hold a little bit of candy up there or do you wanna hold a tea light so what we do to do this part is take about a foot of tinfoil and fold it over once now you place it on top of the head and just push it down just a little wave and squeeze the area pinch all the area around the edge of the truth now I'm going to fold these parts inwards and lift them up so the only thing that you don't want to happen is how the bowl is so deep that you can see it through the eyes so just make sure that doesn't happen and if you see it just push it upwards and then push it back down there okay so from here if you want it to create a bowl on top you can do that with your tin foil just create a larger bowl and that would make a cool little candy display this guy is actually gonna go into my little forest iI'm building so I want to make the top of his head look like broken like a broken tree like it fell off on the top so I'm just gonna build up the sides just a little bit take a piece of tinfoil and I'm just gonna work my design down on top now it's time to attach it to the top of the head and remember you don't want to see the bottom of the bowl through the eyes so just make sure your bowl isn't so deep that you're seeing it through the eyes and once you're satisfied without looks then put your tape on and go from the inside along the outside and down front ways of the tree to make sure it stays totally attached okay in the top you don't want to have just skinny ah edges on the top push them down a little bit with your finger in pinch the top think I did that this guy here and create a little bit more of an edge a flatter edge on top and that will just look like the thickness of the bark that's broken up I'm loving that look and I think I want to add a little bit of a break here yeah I like that so any breaks I make I will cover up and expose tinfoil and now if you wanted to add little features like this like a little bit of eyebrow you can do that now as well I'm gonna do it like this but you can also do it with the paper actually this guy here there's no tin foil under there I did all that design with the paper itself I have some wax paper down on my table to protect my tape my table and I have my lazy susan here and I put a piece of wax paper underneath the tree itself the wax paper comes in handy because once the final bark layer is on the glue is gonna be dripping down when it's all dry you can just take this wax paper off the very bottom and if the wax paper stuck at all you can just cut it off so it's a nice little thing to have underneath when this is drying and we're not going to be putting any material underneath the tree on the very base okay so this part is very messy and the end results are worth it though so let's get started and here is a cup of glue I believe maybe a little bit more and maybe a quarter cup of water I put water in there because it makes it easier to work with you don't want the glue too runny though you just want it to be runny enough that it's easy to work with once you start doing a step you'll figure out the texture that you prefer to work with so the final step you want to do before you put this glue mixture on is make sure all your tape is nice and stuck to your fingers like there's no places where it's sticking up and yeah I just go over I just do a once-over on the whole piece and just check out the tape and how it's looking especially around the fingers so once you're happy with all of that then we're gonna take our Scott towel and I cut mine down in in half make them smaller easier to work with then I'm gonna dip it into the glue so I've just dipped one side in just laid it on top of the glue pull it out fold it in half and just pull the excess off and if this step turns you off what you could do is brush the glue on lay a piece of paper towel over top and then spray some glue on glue on water and then squish it all up I've been doing this method for a very long time to actually look to my blog to see the first time I've done it and it was 2013 so this method works for me but you know it's not for everybody so if you can tweak it to find something that works better for you then by all means do that okay I'm gonna lay it on top and I'm gonna squish this one up into those wrinkles there lay it there I want this one to be really wrinkly and you can use papers where I come in 2013 I had a real gorgeous bark effect with some paper um it was a recycled paper it's kind of like the same thickness a sketch paper and I soaked that in glue and put that on and it gave me some real nice bark effect but this paper towel was pretty quick and easy to use lay my paper towel in there fold it in half pull out the excess you get the idea I've laid down about five pieces wrinkled it up real good and they overlapped each other of course I got the majority on the back and this arm done and the fingers but underneath the hand underneath the palm part isn't got any paper towel yet I'm gonna wait until it's dry and then I'm gonna flip them over and work on the underside and that will be the same time that I did the face okay so if your hand becomes so heavy from the weight of the glue you can stick something underneath there and just prop it up because once it's dry it's dry and it will stay in this position that you put it in so I just put a little pencil there so now I'm going to work on the fingers it's over this one you're gonna need smaller pieces of paper towel and it doesn't matter where you start you can start on the arm and work your way down or start on the fingers and work your way up but doesn't matter so you don't want the piece to wide that might be a little bit too wide there's tear it down get and lay it over top and I'm overlapping there's the tip here and this piece goes a little bit beyond that and I'll twist the end a little bit too long so this rips them off I'm pretty happy with how that looks you can see I did push the towel into here just around the edge because now I'm gonna leave it dry and then once it's dry I will add the BART to the palm of the hands and then I'm gonna work more on his face and he'll have more face details in the next step so I'm gonna get a couple of fans I'm gonna set the fans on it and let it dry so about three hours went by and I was able to turn him upside down he was dry enough and worked on the palm of his hands didn't take very long at all and now I'm gonna work on his face so I'm gonna be using paper towel again and I'm just going to tear these down into small pieces easier to work with I want to make little details on his face and little pieces are easier to work with get his face nice and wrinkled up the face is always my favorite part when you can bring something to life that you've made give it a face and a personality that's the best feeling it really is and then I think of names after which I'm gonna have to do for this guy yeah I got em propped up on all sorts of different props here so I can show you his face up close I got his forehead down there and I'm gonna take little bits at a time I'm just gonna work around his face I'm gonna get some inside those holes too this is where I thought I might add a snow so I would just take towel and squish it up into any type of shape that I so desire look at that oh my god until this makes all the difference in the world oh my gosh popping in with an edit before your face is dry of course once you have all your details figured out on your eyes and your mouth and you pushed all the material inside those holes if you see any sticking up and you can't get at them you can turn the piece around with the back end of a pencil dip it in glue first you can push those down I have added a bit more on this cheeks and added eyebrows and I'm going to give them a beard and I don't know if I'm going to keep it or not but let's give it a try here it's a few more layers of paper towel to create that face I would say I spend about 20 minutes on it so now I'm going to set it in from the fan and let it dry so you can see he's still wet there's glue inside there that's still wet but the exterior of him is completely dry so I can paint him because it's just glue and that's it and so it's not going to mold or anything it's just glue inside there so it will dry eventually and this is what it looks like when it's completely dry see the difference all that white that you see is wet glue so as it dries some of these lines will tighten up and you'll notice a little bit of a difference and the overall look of the piece and these knot holes here are just made with the paper towel and just something glue made a little roll and just did a circle and played around with it until I was happy with how it looked some places I added a little bit more texture just with the paper towel now I could start painting our tree we're gonna create a wash first so we're gonna do that with our black paint we're gonna take a whole bottle of black paint and we're gonna mix it in with a whole bottle of water and mix it up really well before you do that though take out a cap full of the paint and set it aside a cap full or so and set it aside because we want to use some black paint when we're all done painting the tree and it's all dry we're gonna be using some black paint again to do some shadowing work so once you get out your little bit of paint and set it aside a whole bottle mixed in with a whole bottle of water alright guys I started painting and I thought my camera was turned on and it wasn't I have my craft paint wine bottle mixed with one bottle of water mixed up really well and you want that much water in it because it will help get all the paint into all those little cracks in the tree because there's so many cracks so it will just cut half the time out of painting popping in with a heads up once you start painting the surface is gonna soften up quite a bit and that's totally normal there's nothing to worry about this piece will harden right back up again and it's a solid little piece you can drop these things and nothing will happen to them so keep painting there's nothing to worry about so you'll notice after your paint is dry when you turn the tree at different angles you'll see little white spots my chairs on here there's some inside there and some here and that will happen no matter how hard you try to get that paint into every crack that's why the watered down paint helps so much if you didn't water it down there'd be so many more white spots than there is right now so what you want to do is you want to cover those in you want to wait till everything is dry and then you'll really see them cover those in because they will show up on your final coat of paint those little white spots in there and the other thing is I didn't do this myself fine I guess I was distracted but when you start painting I would do underneath the palms first and I make the fingers and then you don't have to worry about doing so much paint after you get the first step done the first coat is a little dry so I'm gonna put the second coat on and I'm using the burnt umber and there's no water in this and I'm going to use a dry brush so I'm just painting over the surface I'm not going to be getting into all the cracks because we want to keep the black in the cracks what burnt umber coat is dry and now I'm going to use my cinnamon brown and I'll dip my brush in and just get off the excess over dry brushing and I'm going to do a coat of that and I'm just going to lightly over the surface and not rub it into all the cracks just lightly over the surface the excess dough all right the cinnamon brown coat is dry and now I'm going to use my beige I'm going to dip it into that base I'm gonna get the majority of it off my brush we only want a little bit on the brush and we're going to just go very lightly all the tops we're just highlighting now that coat is nice and dry now I'm shadowing different areas and I'm gonna take straight black no water mixed in it dip my brush and get the excess off and I'm gonna go around and shadow out all the deep crevices and this adds a lot of depth to your tree like in here I'd want to give that some nice shadow inside there see how different that looks now and I want to add black on the inside of those ridges for sure because this guy is a haunted wicked tree he's getting a lot more black than my usual trees do because we have added lots of black I wasn't shy with the black and see how that has so much dimension absolutely fantastic once you're done with your black and you're going to do a little bit of beige again just a tiny tiny bit dip your brush in there just the ends and gets this majority of it off and just gently go over all the parts that are sticking out towards you and that just gives a highlight it's like the opposite effect of the black of course and it just makes parts of that bark stand out more the batteries in these lights last a long time see she didn't have to pull it out too often but what I did with mine to make it easier to pull out it was just add a little tab and I'm going to show you how I did it in the next step and I also painted the back about the light black and then burnt umber you know the paint's not gonna totally stick you could scrape it off but because it's not going to be touched too often I thought it was okay just to throw the paint on there and if you leave it alone then the paint will stay on there just fine alright so let's add this little tab and I was just thinking probably would be a good idea to add something that will help you pull it out in the future and what I did was I took a piece of ribbon I didn't have anything else on hand that would work I like this because it's nice and thin and it's not gonna interfere with the the fitting of the tea light so I cut a hole right in the middle with my scissors now put my tea light there now I'm not sure if glue will work on this I'm gonna try it okay that's dried now if I pulled on it of course it would come off but it's gonna stay put there if I don't mess around with it so I'm just going to cut one of these free now stick it inside there yeah that works so I'm gonna leave that like that and I'm just gonna cut this a bit shorter you know what I could do I could make a little tab right here maybe I'll do that instead I put glue on the end all right my friends time to make its eyes glow and this part is pretty simple if you have a pencil on hand one with an eraser on the end and a piece of tissue paper whatever color you have chosen and my tissue paper is quite a bit bigger than the hole of it in the back of the head and that's because once we get this paper in there I don't want it moving around and I don't want to have to glue it inside because that would be kind of difficult to do if you have a smaller tree like this one here or you can just reach in you could actually glue the tissue paper right to the back of the eyes and that would work well if you have made a big one like this then you want a piece bigger than the hole itself we're going to squish it up and push it in there then using your pencil the back end of your pencil spread it open and get it all behind with the eyes and the mouth alright let's give this a try so I have some real moss that I gathered up in I believe it was July of this year now it's October so it's all dried out and I'm gonna add it to my tree with tacky glue glue it in place I gathered this moss from my dad's property my parents property I should say they have a ton of it so I didn't go crazy with the moss I just added a little patch here and there and that tacky glue did a great job I can rub over the moss and that stays put so just regular tacky glue will hold it in place and being real Moss I think it looks pretty cool adding a little bit to the fingers along the back of the fingers didn't want the moss to overtake the trees so I just added a little bit okay so the last thing before I go the leaves now if you are adding artificial leaves like I've done here what you can do to attach it is poke a hole on the top or wherever you want to stick a leaf and you can push it into the hole and glue it or you can use a little wire to attach it I would put this in here bend over the tip and then cut off the excess so you'd have a little stem made with the wire and then you'd stick glue in there and shove the wire down into that hole once it's dry it'll stick sometimes the leaves will have its own stem so you can just poke a little hole like I said and push that in there I would use the tacky glue as well even if you get too it's stuck in there pretty good because once you have the tacky glue is dry you can't see it and it holds everything pretty securely alright my friends that brings us to the end of this video I hope you found it helpful and if you did find it helpful please give the video a thumbs up I sure appreciate that and I'd sure love to see a picture of your tree if you've made one you can post pictures on my Facebook page Dollhouses and the Things That Go In Them. The link is in the description box below until next time happy building

Channel: Where The Gnomes Live

Views: 805,615

Rating: 4.9390016 out of 5

Keywords: halloween, How To Make A Halloween Tree With No Clay Or Wires, fake bark, how to make fake bark, sharon ojala fake bark, spooky tree, haunted tree, candy bowl, handmade tree, diy halloween ideas

Id: 2_XgEcpXeME

Length: 37min 35sec (2255 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 07 2018