It’s been awhile since I last blogged, and for good reason.  My dad, who has always gone all out for Christmas, decided that it would be fun to redo the outdoor decor this year Nightmare before Christmas style.  So for the past few days I have been designing and working on life-size Nightmare characters.  You read right – Life. Size.  Once done, we’ll be putting them up in early October, they will stay up through New Years, with some changes around Thanksgiving to make it more Christmas-y.

I first sketched out all of the characters I wanted on paper, determining how tall I wanted them and such.   Then my dad and I hit the Home Depot where we picked up 8×4 sheets of plywood and got to work.  I drew out all of the characters on the wood from my sketches, then my dad cut them out, we sanded the edges and primed each piece, so the wood would seal better.  Then we started to do fun part – the painting.

The pieces I chose to create are the trademark hill (which is about eight feet tall and eight feet wide at the base), two Jacks (six feet tall each, one for Halloween, one for Christmas), Sally (five and a half feet), Boogie (about eight feet tall and about four at the widest part), the Mayor (about six feet with his extremely tall top hat), Lock, Shock, and Barrel all in the bathtub, Zero, and the Man Eating Wreath.  We’re also building some tombstones and adding in some extra things here and there.

It’s been a lot of fun, and also a lot of work.  Wednesday will be day four on the project and we’re making good headway.  It’s been in the 80s for the past week, and is suppose to stick around that temperature for the next week.

I’ll keep you updated on our progress, as well as show off the final result!  It should be exciting!