Giant heart photo backdrop for Monster Prom

Published by Manning on October 30th, 2024

This thing was pretty easy!

Making the heart and banner

I designed the heart on paper and then messed with it in Photoshop to make it perfectly symmetric and stuff. I transferred the drawing to a giant panel of foam board using the grid method — you know, you put your small drawing in a grid, and then draw a large grid onto a large surface, and sketch the pieces square by square until it all comes together. Pretty easy once you dive it and try it, really!

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.

I mentioned the big panel of foam board; I actually made this out of several pieces of 30″x20″ foam board, aka foam core. The overall size of the heart is a grid that’s two piece wide and two pieces tall (so that’s 60″x40″), with a fifth piece centered at the bottom for the pointy part at the bottom of the heart. I taped these pieces together with thin pieces of shipping tape; thin enough that I could later cover them with masking tape. Shipping tape is generally stronger than masking tape, but it looks bad when spray painted, so that’s why I covered them with masking tape afterward.

I also made a second copy of this heart shape, and glued the two pieces together, to make the whole thing more sturdy. The finished giant heart shape was a little flimsy in the middle, so I reinforced the back of it with a bunch of popsicle sticks hot glued into place.

I covered the entire outer edge of the heart with masking tape. This is because the cut edges of the foam board do not take spray paint very well and they tend to look ugly. Masking tape with paint doesn’t look perfect, but it looks a lot better than just the foam board edges.

I spray painted the heart pink, let it dry completely, and then I used blue painter’s tape and newspaper to mask out all the blue areas I wanted to add. I spray painted these white first, and then blue.

I then painted a bunch of simple little details by hand with acrylic paint.

I made the three separate drops of blood the same way — although these are just one layer of foam board.

Making the base and stand

I’m pretty clueless when it comes to making things out of wood! So there are probably less stupid ways to do this part. I bought a bunch of pieces of wood, 1″x2″ I think, and sawed them by hand to make all the pieces I needed. I used my cheap drill to drill some holes (badly) and then I inserted a bunch of screws (badly), and, well, the thing stands up but it’s not very straight. For whatever reason the four pieces at the bottom all angle upward a tiny bit. No big deal, it’s sturdy enough anyway! And my backyard is pretty uneven, so I found I can place this thing inside a slight dent in the ground and then it’s very stable.

When I was done, I spray painted the whole thing black.

I was a little worried about wind knocking the whole thing over, so you can see I placed two bricks on the back of the base. The thing stayed standing all night with no problem.

Oh yeah, and I put three screws across the top cross beam of the stand (not shown), and on the back of the heart shape I added three twist ties with loops in them. I used a ton of hot glue and shipping tape to attach the twist ties to the heart; I was really worried about them falling off, but they were fine. Before the party it was easy to lift up the heart and put the twist tie loops over the screws, and then the thing stayed there all night; seemed nice and stable.

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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