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

Posts tagged "monster":

Monster Prom band, part 3: Frankenstein keytarist!

The finished Frankenstein standing in my yard in daylight.

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. Read more…

Published by Manning on October 29th, 2024 | No Comments

Monster Prom band, part 2: demon singer!

This demonic singer lady is one of the most challenging things I’ve ever made! I wanted to try to make a free-standing life-size human figure, using just my normal techniques with foam board and tape and stuff. This was a first for me and it worked out pretty well!

The demon singer lady pretty much completed, standing at her microphone; she does not yet have her guitar

I started with the legs; it was critical to design these to be strong enough to stand up on their own and to support the weight of the figure. (Although I cheated a bit with the microphone stand; coming up.) Read more…

Published by Manning on October 29th, 2024 | No Comments

Monster Prom band, part 1: alien drummer!

For our Monster Prom Halloween party, my main project was our monster new wave band. I started with the alien drummer because I knew he would be the easiest!

The first idea I had in creating the drummer was to re-use my paper maché alien mask from last Halloween as the head of the drummer. So that saved me a ton of time and materials right off the bat! Read more…

Published by Manning on October 29th, 2024 | No Comments

Three-headed paper maché dragon sculpture! — part 2

This is part two of two of Isabella the dragon! See the first part here.

The sea serpent’s bodies and heads and fins and other various parts were done, but I had to do some other steps before assembling them. It made sense to switch gears here and work on the pedestal and tray area, to figure out how they’ll fit with the dragons.

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Published by Manning on September 5th, 2017 | 8 Comments

Three-headed paper maché dragon sculpture! — part 1

Isabella three-headed sea serpent sculpture

This was an incredibly fun commission piece I got to work on! I was contacted by a member of the Crewe of Columbus, a Mardi Gras crewe in Mobile, Alabama, and asked to make a sculpture of one of their parade floats — a very charming three-headed sea serpent(/dragon) named Isabella. The sculpture would have a serving tray area on top and be the centerpiece on one of the buffet tables at the group’s annual ball. The client sent me tons of photos of the Isabella float and asked for a sculpture that was approximately 40″ long from head(s) to tail(s). I couldn’t wait to get started!

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Published by Manning on September 5th, 2017 | 7 Comments