The Monster Book Of Monsters

My next project was the book of monsters, I had just purchased a Dremel sanding and carving tool and was keen to try it out. I drew the teeth on some balsa wood that I had bought, then it was just a matter of carving the teeth out and painted them. The Dremel is one of the handiest tools when it comes to doing fine work as it gives you so much control for carving fine detail. This is one tool that I highly recommend you should get.

Next was to carve the nose and the eyes ridges out of foam, once that was done we glued them all in place.

We then cut the front and back cover out of the foam core board, made a spine out of a cardboard roll and glued some fake fur over the top of the lot. I wasn’t happy with just the plain grey color of the fur so I painted it lightly to give it the look that I wanted.

I then got a pair of scissors and trimmed the fur down in places to give it a scruffy look like the book in the movie. I used a hair trimmer and trimmed back the fur where the writing would be. We bought some plastic eyes from a craft shop and glued the eyes in place.

The last thing was to use some puffy gold paint to write; The Monster Book of Monsters. It’s not that easy doing lettering using puffy paint from a tube. So I drew the lettering on a peace of paper and cut them out so what I was left with was a stencil. I placed the stencil on the trimmed bits, masked the rest of the book up and sprayed it with gold paint so I had a guide to follow.

TIP:The best way to stick the stencil to the fabric is with removable spray adhesive.

Oversized Books

The first props we made were the huge books as we could do this in the evening inside watching TV. We decided to make these books over sized as we wanted them to stand out form the other props. I had been collecting foam core posters from work as they would throw these out after they had a function.

For the pages I just glued some foam together, I then added some texture to the edge of the foam which made it look like old worn pages, we then rounded the spine with my hot wire cutter.  To give the books that old look, we glued some small pieces of rope across the spine. We cut the front and back cover from the foam core board slightly larger than the foam pages and glued the vinyl (leather looking) material over the foam core.

WE also decided that we needed to make a Harry Potter Birthday book for Leon to keep as a memento of his 21st Birthday. Just click the link to see how we made this one.

 

The Foam Books for the Library

How could anyone have a Harry Potter party and not include the  Library. After all it’s Hermine’s favorite place and a a lot of important discoveries were made there.

We wanted to create the look of a library, but without having to make a heap of individual books, they also had to be old looking. We tried looking at thrift shops and we found 6 or so books that would look good but there weren’t enough books that matched the look we wanted. As they were going on fake shelves and they also needed to be really light weight we decided to make our own books.

To save some time we came up with an idea of how we could make a row of various sized books in one piece. That way we didn’t have to do individual covers. I cut up a heap of foam blocks to the different sizes and glued them all together. When they were dried I sealed them with watered down glue.

Then we used spray adhesive to glue some calico fabric over the whole row and made them look like they were old fabric books. I handed these over to Frances to paint them as I had quite a few other props to make.

When she had finished painting them as individual books they looked good but they looked too nice and new. So I got some black paint and I dry brushed it lightly over all the books, it was amazing how much they aged.

They needed titles or other detail to complete the transformation. We had found some stick on lettering and patterns that are used for scrap booking at $2.00 shop, so we bought a few packs in silver and gold and stuck them on, it totally transformed them and gave them some life.

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