Monster Prom band, part 3: Frankenstein keytarist!
Published by Manning on October 29th, 2024
Last but not least! I learned a lot of important lessons when I was working on our demonic singer — mostly that I didn’t want to do anything that complicated again for a long time! :) So I figured out ways to make our Frankenstein monster keytarist a lot simpler. The key here was to keep most of the shapes much more geometric and simple rather than organic and curvy. You can see the guy’s torso and legs and left arm are basically just simple box shapes.
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.
The legs are foam boards on the outer and inner sides, and poster board on the front. I left the back totally open; no one’s going to see that.
The torso is just foam board on the sides and front, and I built up some curved shapes with foam board on the back, and covered them with strips of paper and tape.
I made the sort of Frankenstein-ish head out of foam board and covered it with one layer of paper maché.
I made the microphone and stand exactly the same way I did for my demonic singer lady. Just like with that one, the microphone has a wooden dowel that goes through it and out the front and is glued into the roof of the keytarist monster’s mouth, so when the statue is assembled the weight is distributed on three points rather than just the legs.
(I wrote the above paragraph before the statue was finished! In the end I didn’t need to connect the head to the body at all, so it just sat there attached to the microphone; no one could tell. The body was very stable on its own.)
For the arms, I went a little more complicated for the first one, and then I decided that was too much work and went much simpler for the other…
So, the right arm is an armature of foam board, with strips of Lacroix boxes wrapped around, and then the whole thing is covered with masking tape. I was trying to go for slightly (slightly!) realistic musculature; it’s fun to do but it’s a lot of work. At this stage I realized the shape was too flimsy so I went and ahead and applied one layer of paper maché to it. I managed to avoid paper maché for the demonic singer lady’s arms and legs, but that was because the shapes were small/narrow enough to remain fairly sturdy on their own. So I didn’t have much choice here other than to add paper maché, and this went against my philosophy of “cut every corner possible!” for this prop.
Anyway, after falling into this trap with the right arm I decided to do something much simpler for the left. Just foam board and poster board and tape. Much easier. The fingers are foam board as well, two strips each, curled up and taped together. I like the idea of the guy having mismatched arms; no one will suspect it’s due to laziness… or will they?
When all the parts were built I spray painted and assembled them. Oh yeah, and I used a big ol’ paint marker for a lot of the details: the fingernails, the stitches, the lines on the robot arm, etc.
The spiked bracelet is just a piece of foam board, and the spikes are just cones of poster board, taped closed and not even painted!
To attach the arms to the torso, I made some strong poster board tubes and inserted them into the sides of the torso, basically as pegs sticking out, and hot-glued them in place. I then cut holes in the arms so that they could fit onto these pegs. I used tons of hot glue on the pegs and on the inner surfaces of the arms to glue the arms on. In the pic above that’s in my kitchen (with the singer lady next to him) you can see the arms are not yet glued on; they’re sort of hanging there and are ready to fall off.
The chain around his “neck” (what neck?) was left over from my skeleton wrestler costume from 2022! (The Frankenstein really doesn’t have a neck; I connected the chain to his shoulders with twist ties.)
If I’d had more time and if I needed this statue to last longer, I would’ve covered the whole thing in paper maché — anywhere from one to eight layers, depending on how sturdy it would need to be. Anyway, I skipped all that and it saved me a ton of time. I included a pic above that shows the back of the statue so you can see all the parts I skipped — anything to save on time and materials!
And that’s it for this guy! Coming soon, I’ll write an article about making his foam keytar prop…
About Manning Krull
How to make a 4-foot paper maché alligator
My violin skull mask, Mardi Gras 2015
Three-headed paper maché dragon sculpture
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