It’s that time of year again. Happy Halloween everyone! And hurray for Halloween at the House that Worked Out!!
Last year was the first year we had any time to be able to put into building props for Halloween, and we were really happy with our creations. Our Grim Reaper and the Eastern European coffin are better than anything we have seen in the shops, as are our gravestones, and they are all sturdy enough to last many Halloweens (unlike some of our store-bought decorations, which definitely look the worse for wear after a year packed away). Something we had wanted to make, though, but ran out of time for, was a giant spider.
The grand plan is to keep making at least one, big dramatic prop every year until we have covered all the creepy themes we want in our Halloweens. There are a couple of arachnaphobes in the family, so a giant spider has been high on the list of Props We Want To Build. 2016 was to be the Halloween of the giant spider.
The problem is, we are not particularly artistic people, and a lame giant spider is far worse than no spider at all. Many have tried and failed when it comes to giant spiders. Google ‘giant spider halloween’ under images, and you see a range of prop spiders of varying degree of realism, most on the ‘unrealistic’ end of the range. Some people probably want a cheerful, fluffy, child-friendly spider, but not me. I really wanted something that nightmares are made of. Aragog come to life (or at least one of Aragog’s less-impressive but still scary cousins).
This spider is probably the best one I found in my googling- but these people are obviously talented, artistic, creative, professional prop-makers; ours would not be like this. But could we amateurs make something which wouldn’t just be an expensive embarassment?
I found a great tutorial on Halloween Forum by Spider Rider; this guy really knows what he is doing, and it looked like something we could attempt.
Here is our version:
We ordered a cheap fitness ball for the abdomen. The legs were to be out of PVC pipe, and the thorax/head…well, we didn’t really know, but we thought we would try offcuts of insulation foam used in our roofing.
We adapted Spider Rider’s system for attaching the legs. If we could have copied exactly, we would have, but we haven’t seen plumbing parts like those used in his tutorial, so we improvised. We used 4 lengths of 40mm PVC pipe and screwed these to an offcut of MDF board. Then we attached 45º bends to each end of pipe.
Other people mentioned the completed spider being too heavy to hold itself up on its own legs, so we attached the MDF thorax/abdomen to a cordwood log leftover from our housebuild.
The legs…good legs are just as important on a spider as on a person (ha ha). Seriously, though, realistic legs is what separates the awesome giant spider props from the lame giant spider props. The spiders with only one joint in each leg looked pretty fake. We did what Spider Rider did and gave some of the legs two joints, using both 90º and 45º bends, and some legs stretched out with only one 90º used. This looks quite real. It is worth spending the time getting this right. Once they are glued with PVC glue, there is no going back.
We glued a couple of pieces of our foam insulation as a base for the thorax and head.
The next step was to cover the spider’s legs and body in spray insulation foam. This is a messy, horrible job. We didn’t know if the foam would stick to the PVC and the plastic of the fitness ball; we did not prepare the surfaces in any way, being in a rush. It was difficult to apply the foam to any surface which wasn’t flat, but we found that as long as we sprayed the foam onto itself, it would hold onto any bits sliding down sides until they dried.
We used ordinary, oil-based spray paint to colour our spider. Again, this could have failed miserably if the oil-based spray paint had melted the foam, but we did a test patch, and it seemed OK.
We were going to do proper eyes and hair, but frankly, we were pretty happy with how it looked and didn’t want to mess around too much more in case we ruined it.
So, Halloween 2016 has been the year of the Giant Spider and it was a SUCCESS!
“Down, Aragog! Down!”
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