Manning Makes Stuff - Halloween decorations, paper mache masks, costumes, party ideas, and more

Manning Makes Stuff - Halloween decorations, paper mache masks, costumes, party ideas, and more

Eyeball/tongue monster!


Published by Manning on October 30th, 2024

This batshit thing is my wife’s project and I love it! She actually made most of the parts last year; there were some problems with the first version of the eyestalks, so she scrapped those after our party and kept the eyes and the hands, and this year she made new improved eyestalks as well as a new base and she reassembled everything.

A monster that's peeking over a fence; it has two big eyeballs on green eye stalks, two big green hands with pink nails, and a long pink tongue

I’m putting this disclaimer on all my Halloween 2024 (Monster Prom) projects: I was in such a panic this year I did not take many progress photos of anything! And the pics I did take are at really random stages. So I’ll dump all my pics for each project near the top, and just write up all my steps below those.

A giant punch bowl prop with the monster's long tongue falling down into it

A wider shot showing the monster on the fence and its long tongue going into the punch bowl below

The idea for the tongue came a bit later, when we were almost done! It was a nice way to connect this project to our paper maché punch bowl project.

So, real quick, here’s how all of this was made: The eyes are balloons with paper maché on ’em. We made the eyestalks by cutting the shapes out of foam board and then taking a piece of foam insulation tubing, cutting it down the middle, gluing both sides onto the foam board eyestalk shapes, and then covering the whole thing with about four layers of paper maché.

The fingers are pieces of foam insultation tubing, split in half, bent onto a base of foam board, and then covered with paper maché. The fingernails are just posterboard.

The base for the whole sculpture is a rectangle of foam board covered in paper maché. We drove a nail through this base to attach the monster to the top of our wooden fence.

The tongue is a bunch of strips of foam board taped together and then curved here and there and then covered with paper maché. To connect the tongue, I added a twist tie with a loop on it at the base of the tongue, and then I nailed this through the base of the monster and into the fence.

Easy! And fun!

Interested in commissioning a piece from me? Please see my page about custom paper maché pieces. Please email me; don't put your request in a comment below.

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