Realistic Graveyard Tombstones 💀 DIY Halloween Props

hey i'm jamie and i'm jay and today we're gonna make foam halloween tombstones halloween tombstones are probably the most requested thing we've gotten to build on our channel and we're psyched that we finally did it this is actually our first time building tombstones with this type of foam we've done some other foam tombstones before but we've never carved them never textured them stuff like that so we're really excited to try this out so many home hunters have built tombstones over the years and they really perfected the technique one of the ones we really love is van oaks props they just put out a video on how to make tombstones about a month ago and their technique is amazing so we use a lot of their techniques to build our tombstones yeah shout out to van oaks in general definitely go check out that channel we're gonna be making these tombstones out of two-inch insulation foam it's basically like really dense styrofoam so you can cut it with like anything you could use power tools you could use a saw there's a cool tool called a hot wire which is not a hot wire this thing of course i can i'm an electrician a hot wire that cuts through foam that's really common for this but we're going to use this it's just a knife but before we actually cut out anything we're going to lay out our tombstone shape with the magic marker so for the gravestone shape we just googled some different gravestone shapes and picked out ones we liked we downloaded a bunch of different reference photos here's the little skeleton guy i'm going to put at the top he's kind of cool it's a little dark but this is the overall shape we're going for okay we're going to use a utility knife to cut these out of the foam now this is just a basic knife with a nice long blade so that we can get all the way through the two inches so i'm going to start at the top i'm going to go in about halfway to the foam and i'm just going to make a clean pull all the way across my arch we got our tombstones all cut out now it's time to add in our words so we're going to add in a name and a date and a little epitaph so we cut out these stencils and now we're going to put them on the tombstones [Music] our stencils are on and it's time to fill in our letters so that we can carve them out one really easy way to do this is just to use some spray paint and give it like a really light coat but some spray paint will actually eat away at the foam and can mess things up so a safer method is just to use a sharpie it'll take a little longer but we'll get some really clean lines and not have to worry about the foam all right you ready for this part we get to peel it off now to engrave our letters we're going to use a rotary tool with a tiny little bit and this depth stop so that it's all the same exact depth if you're going to try this make sure you wear safety glasses wear a mask and i like to wear a headlamp or just have a light around because if you can really see brightly what you're doing it makes the carbon go a lot better so on the top of my tombstone i'm going to draw what's called a death head dust head is really cool it's a skull with some wings in the background so i'm going to draw this and i'm going to draw it first with chalk [Music] so [Music] i have personally never done that before and that was really fun it was awesome and i just realized overnight that this guy right here he's part of the beetlejuice logo so that's really cool so letters are done time to like shape and texture and make it look like old stone so we are going to round over these corners and kind of smooth out the edges and one of the tools we can use for that is this it's called a sureform tool it makes really quick work of that we're going to use this knife to cut some cracks in the tombstones to cut your cracks you're going to hold your knife kind of at an angle and what you want to do is cut a v but it's not an even v it's kind of a jaggedy v look at some pictures of cracks and then you can get a good reference [Music] so [Music] i'm gonna give the edges and the words really light sanding just to get all the little nubbins off [Music] that was that part's really fun i like that it's just it just car the foam carves away so easy it's very satisfying yeah it really is it's a lot of fun so this is the base that we made and we just glued two pieces of foam together which we're going to show you how to do in a minute but and then we just use the same technique to like kind of shape it and stuff and then we're basically going to glue that like that so it has a base so to glue the base to the tombstones we're going to use clear gorilla glue and this stuff works really well for foam and we just learned from van oaks again that to use it best you should actually spray the foam with some water get it damp first and then put your glue on so we're going to try that [Music] [Music] i think that's it i can't clamp it so it's just gonna have to balance there [Music] so mine is not flat enough on the bottom and it's not going to stay by itself and i don't think we can clamp it or put anything heavy on it so what do i do should i just like hold it for like a half hour that does not seem like a good idea um i'm gonna hold it at least for like a minute maybe it'll get tacky at least the bottom of my thing is not very flat so there's not a lot of great surface contact between the base and the thing but the glue should expand and fill in those gaps at least that's what i'm counting on so we'll see what happens in like 20 minutes and if you look over here my wife jamie has made this perfect one that doesn't require things like that so follow her instructions and not much good news the glue totally worked i ended up dribbling some like extra gorilla glue in these corners to fill in some of the gaps but it's super strong so we can move on so the really cool thing about this foam is that all you need to give it a stone texture is some water and a little bit of heat now we're going to use a heat gun but i've seen it done with a torch before so if you do have a torch and not a heat gun you can totally do it with that but we discovered we have a little more control with the heat gun so that's what we're going to use so to do the stone texture what you do is you spray it with a squirt gun spray gun squirt bottle water turn around your heat gun and use kind of a light touch at first because you can always go back over it [Music] you can see the uh texture starting to form there [Music] so you can see it's starting to get a little bit of texture here don't hold too long on your words because it will open up the foam and deform the shape a bit so when you're going over your words do it kind of quick and same thing with the cracks you see it opens the cracks up too but just keep spraying it down keep it wet and have fun with it [Applause] [Music] so we textured our stones but i don't love what it did to the carving at the top here it kind of raised you can see over here it raised the edges a bit so what i'm going to do is take some sandpaper and rough that up and kind of smooth over the edges of it [Music] we're finally at the part i've been looking forward to this part so this is called dry lock it's it's basically a masonry sealer it's kind of like a sandy paint and we're going to put it all over the whole tombstone and it's going to give it a really cool stone-like texture and it's also going to protect it from the weather so to apply it we're just going to use a chip brush and brush it on i think one coat should do it and then we can kind of dab it to get rid of the breaststrokes [Music] [Music] so to paint the tombstones we're just going to use regular old craft acrylic paint now the thing that makes tombstones look really old is that they've been aged by years and years of dirt and rain and mold and all sorts of grossness so to emulate those layers we're gonna go back and forth with a few different techniques we're gonna do some washes and let those drip down we're gonna do some dry brushing we'll do some stippling all sorts of fun stuff and keep doing those until we end up with something we're happy with [Music] [Music] so so a couple things we noticed when we were painting that you might want to try is one is putting this dark color kind of at the bottom of a crack helps to accentuate the crack i imagine like the crack got filled with dirt and then the rain washed that dirt out so it'd be under the crack and not on top of it and then another thing is these big sections of color like you know the brown and then the dark here turned out to be really nice you don't want it to be too skinny of sections because then it looks really really stripey and you don't want that big swatches of color is good so now that the wash is done we're going to go back in with a smaller brush and darken up some of the details like the letters and the cracks so the dark wash areas is kind of like the low spots the next part is the high spots which we're going to do with dry brushing so we're going to take a lighter color and that's going to kind of exaggerate those highlights and it's going to make the stone texture really pop [Music] like any painting you can noodle on this forever but at some point you have to call it done so that's what we're doing these are done you could add more details like maybe some lichen or moss or mold is growing on it like greens and i don't know maybe some birds of poop i don't know you could add all kinds of detail to your tombstones but we are really happy with these so we're gonna put them outside and see how they look [Music] if you enjoyed this video we have a ton of halloween diy projects in the playlist right there hit that like button subscribe if you like our stuff and until next time stay wicked hey i'm jamie um something kind of something some brac split

Channel: Wicked Makers

Views: 274,338

Rating: 4.9707589 out of 5

Keywords: DIY Halloween, Halloween DIY, DIY Halloween Props, Halloween Props DIY, DIY Halloween decorations, DIY halloween decor, husband and wife, halloween decor, halloween decorations, halloween props, best halloween decorations, jay and jaimie, diy, halloween diy, wicked makers, tombstones, graveyard tombstones, halloween tombstones, diy tombstones, diy halloween tombstones, halloween tombstones diy, halloween tombstone prop, tombstones yard, diy tombstones for halloween

Id: vEpFd1oqwDA

Length: 14min 54sec (894 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 01 2020