Happy seventh day of spooky season and Blogtober! I wanted to share a super easy and creative Halloween DIY with you all today, involving some extremely cheap mache decorations and some acrylic paints; you may have guessed at this point what it's going to be... yes it's painting mache Halloween decorations. This super easy DIY is perfect for children or for adults, and you can paint and decorate them however you want, which is what makes this DIY so great.
Last week I bought for only £1 each from Hobbycraft, a small mache gravestone and an adorable tiny mache coffin box with a removable lid; as soon as I saw them I knew I wanted to take them home and paint them. Click here for the link to the mache gravestone and here for the mache coffin. So I am going to let you in on how I decorated these little decorations and suggest some other ways that you could get creative with them.
What You'll Need:
Mache Halloween decorations
Acrylic paints in colours of your choice
Paint brushes/ paint sponges
Old newspaper (to protect your surfaces from paint)
Gravestone
For the mache gravestone, I wanted to paint it to make it look like an actual grave, so I started by mixing up some grey paint using black and white, and adding to it until I had the shade of grey that I wanted to cover it all with. Then I used a big paint brush to paint the whole thing grey, including the base and all 4 sides and left it to dry for a while before painting on another layer to make sure it was properly coated. When the base had completely dried, I mixed up some lighter and some darker grey and used a tiny paint brush, or you can also use a sponge to get the same effect, I dabbed on the lighter and darker paint to create a textured look, as if the grave was old and crumbling. I wanted to dab on some green paint too to look like moss, because old graves do sometimes as have moss growing on them, and I wanted to add a little colour to it. To finish it off I used a thin brush and some black paint to write R.I.P in the centre of the grave. You can write whatever you want on your grave or you could leave it blank, and you can paint it to look however you want. You can add blood splatters or cracks onto it, you could even paint it a whole other colour or add glitter if you wanted, there a so many things you could do with this.
Mini Coffin Box
For the tiny coffin, I squeezed out some black acrylic paint and I painted the whole thing black, inside and out using a big paint brush. I painted another layer on to make sure it was evenly coated and didn't miss any spots. When the whole things had dried, I simply penciled a cross onto the front of the lid, and I used a ruler to make sure it was symmetrical and straight. When I was happy with the size and position of the cross, I took a tiny paint brush and some gold, metallic paint and filled in the cross, taking care to keep it straight and in the lines. And voila, the coffin is done; obviously there are so many other options for decorating this but I wanted to keep it simple as I plan to use this for storing small things in my bedroom, but I originally wanted to paint it purple just because why not. A few examples of other ways you could paint it is make it look like an actual coffin using brown paint to look like wood; paint on a crack to you can see inside of the coffin, maybe there's a skeleton in there, or you could add some blood dripping or a spiders web. I do think that metallic paint looks great on top of black paint so you could glam it up with some silver, gold or some glitter, whatever you think will look good. You could even create a little something spooky to go inside the coffin, like a paper mache body or you could put sweeties in them and use them as Halloween party favours.
Tell me in the comments what you would do with these mache decorations, I'd love to hear other ways to decorate them as I might go back and buy some more! I really hoped you liked today's Blogtober post, I hope to see you back here again for day seven, which will involve some of my favourite shows that I'm watching this autumn.
India X