party Archives | Manning Makes Stuff

Posts tagged "party":

Halloween 2023 theme: UFO!

This is another Halloween theme that I’ve been eager to do for many years! 1950s sci-fi, flying saucers, little green men, et cetera et cetera. I drew all of this stuff in Photoshop with my tablet, and animated everything in Adobe Animate. Read more…

Published by Manning on October 3rd, 2023 | No Comments

Halloween 2022 theme: Nosferatu, a Century of Horror

For many years I’d been waiting for 2022 to roll around so I could do this Halloween party theme; it’s the 100th anniversary of the film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror!

New Halloween party invitation: Prick or Treat!

My wife and I skipped Halloween last year due to the pre-vaccine Covid situation, but this year we’ve decided to throw a small, outdoor, vaccinated party. There’s no real theme and we’re not making a ton of decorations, but I did want to get back into the rhythm of creating an animated invitation to get people (including me!) excited. Here it is!
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Published by Manning on October 12th, 2021 | 2 Comments

Halloween 2018 theme revealed: Gingerbread house!

This year for our Halloween party we’ll be transforming our apartment into a haunted gingerbread house, à la Hansel and Gretel but Halloween-ified, with tons of giant paper maché candies, a huge witch statue and an oven, and probably some bits from other spooky fairytales mixed in. Check out the invitation video, with art and animation by me and music and sound by Robbie Davis:

You ain’t invited but you can watch the video!

Published by Manning on August 27th, 2018 | 3 Comments

“Good enough for Halloween!”

“Good enough for Halloween” is a phrase I say all the time; it’s basically my mantra during all of August / September / October, and I do not say it lightly!

I hope I don’t need to explain that Halloween is my favorite time of year, and I care about it so deeply that I can get super emotional about it if I’m not careful! So you might think that I’d want to obsess over every detail of my Halloween projects, but it’s really the opposite! I honestly try to cut as many corners as possible for my Halloween stuff. Read more…

Published by Manning on August 25th, 2018 | No Comments

Ouija board wall decoration

For all my Halloween parties, I try to have at least one big decorated area that makes for a good backdrop for photos. This time our main photo area was this big ouija board wall decoration. It was really easy to do and ended up in a ton of our guests’ photos.

The letters and shapes are all cut out from black poster board. I photographed and measured the wall, and designed the arrangement of the letters in Photoshop to fill up the space nicely. Here’s what that looked like:

Paper maché chairs for my séance Halloween party!

For my upcoming séance party I wanted to have a few pieces of paper maché furniture stuck upside down on the ceiling — a table with a crystal ball, two chairs, maybe a little dresser with a lamp, etc. The main guidelines I set for myself are: the furniture all has to be extremely lightweight, since it’ll all be attached with thumbtacks to the ceiling, and it doesn’t have to be super realistic, since the lighting in the party will be low. I started with the chairs; here’s how I made ’em!

I have some simple Ikea chairs that I used as a model. My plan was to trace and/or draw the various pieces of a chair onto foam board, and then cut out all the pieces and assemble ’em and hope they resemble a chair.