Monster Squad

Hello again!  I know that it's been a while since I last posted anything....but I've got something really exciting to post about now!  I decided last month that I would enter the Duck Brand duct tape 'Stick or Treat Jack-o-lantern contest'.  The basic premise of the contest was that you had to decorate a pumpkin (either real or fake) with duck tape.  You could use other materials as well, and the submissions would be judged based on Originality, Workmanship, Use of Color and Use of Duct Tape.  I couldn't decide on any one thing for my submission, so I decided to instead make a diorama and put a bunch of different monster pumpkins in it.  I was originally going to make zombie pumpkins, but I thought that the different monsters would be more colorful and fun to make.  I started off by making the actual diorama out of a cardboard box that I brought home from work.  I wanted to make it pumpkin shaped too, to keep with the jack-o-lantern theme.  I then cut out a tree shape and some tombstones.

I cut out a hill and haunted house with a creepy looking tree and started to cover them with duct tape.

Once I had the entire background of the diorama covered I moved on to the pumpkins.

I had bought a couple of little bags of foam craft pumpkins and I picked out a few that would fit the monster shapes that I was going for.  I stuck wires into the pumpkins for arms and legs and then covered them with duct tape as well.

Here's Franky

Wolfy (the plaid on his shirt was a pain...)

Dracula...y

And Zombie-y.

I then had to make an unlucky pumpkin running away from this motley crew of monsters.

Poor guy.

I also made an owl to hang out up in the creepy tree.

And here are some pictures of it all put together!  I added some clouds to help break up the sky and some 'highlights' on the hills.

I discovered that if I lit it from underneath it gave it some pretty awesome shadows!

It took me a long time to get it all finished, but it was pretty fun making it!  I did a lot of it while watching Murder She Wrote which makes pretty much everything more fun anyways, hahaha.  Even better than having fun while making it though, was having it WIN 1ST PLACE IN THE COMPETITION!  That's right!  The judges picked my submission as the winning jack-o-lantern!  They publicly announced the winner on their website today! http://duckbrand.com/Promotions/stick-or-treat.aspx

It was super cool to see my submission on their main contest page, and even cooler to win $1,000!  That should help pay off some of my tuition! Hurray!