Update: Related technique and more downloads: Ghost Portraits!

Did you know Great Aunt Gertrude was a zombie?  Or Ancient Uncle Elrod was a tad undead?  Unfortunately for my Halloween décor, I don’t really have ghouls in the family.  But we can fake it with a little photo manipulation.

These creepy portraits will look great hung on a wall, or in small frames on your serving table, at any scary Halloween party.  You can either design your own, using the instructions provided here, or you can download the set provided here.  Then just have them printed in whatever size to fit your frames, at your local print shop on on your home computer.

How to make your own creepy vintage photos

Supplies:

• Photo-editing program.  These instructions assume you are working in Photoshop.
• Vintage photo image files.  Portraits work best, and the larger the better if you want to print big versions for your walls.  You can scan photos of your own relatives, or you can find public domain photos online. [You can find photos from public archives like the Library of Congress with no copyright restrictions here.]
• Skulls:  You’ll need a transparent photographed skull image. The simplest way to get the skull you need is to use a skull themed Photoshop brush set, of which several can be found online for free.

Method:

This is how to add a creepy skull effect to your photo.  There are of course many other possible spooky details you can add.  More detailed instructions can be found below the photos.

1. Open your photo file.
2. Create a new layer, and determine what skull size and shape will best fit your portrait’s head.  Place skull in new layer.  It should have enough transparency to see through it to the portrait layer.  If not, you may need to increase the transparency of the skull layer.
3. Line up the skull with the portrait head as well as you can.  Resize and move as necessary to get the mouth and eyes of the skull lined up with your portrait.
4. Next, fit the skull to the face.  Select the skull.  Under the Transform menu, use Warp.  Drag the dots around to fit the skull to the angle of the face.  In this example, I dragged the right jawline of the skull out to better match the portrait jawline, and pulled in the left side of the skull.  I also moved the nose to match up with the portrait nose.  It doesn’t have to be perfect, but you need the eyes, mouth, nose and jaw to match up as well as possible for best effect.  Don’t worry about the outline of the skull, we’ll be erasing that in the next step.
5. Finally, erase the outside of the skull.  Use your eraser (a soft feathered brush) to erase anywhere the skull exceeds the face (like on the left side in this example) and pretty much all the edges of the skull image, leaving the features intact.  You can also erase any shading that doesn’t fit with the photo.

Once you have your final files, just take them to your local FedEx Office and have them color printed in whatever size you need to fit your décor.

Download the Files

Want the look, without the work?  Click here to download a zip file of the images featured in this post, plus a few extras.

It’s a really neat technique that just uses acrylic gel medium from the art store– no toxic chemicals or anything like that.  The toner from the photocopy remains on the wood, so the white areas of your photo become wood colored, which is a really nice natural effect.   I’m planning on make a bunch using some wood veneer cards to use as keepsake gift tags for gifts this year.

For the tutorial I used one of my squid watercolors — in the example above I used a photocopy of a photo of The Boy, perfect for grandparent gifting! And it’s easy to do, though I will warn you it does take a little practice to get the timing exactly right, so plan on practicing on some scrap wood first.

I didn’t really go over how to use photos for the ornaments in the tutorial, and there’s a few things I’ve learned.  Pick a photo with a lot of contrast, and ideally use photoshop, or some other photo editing software, to turn it black and white and bump up the contrast.  In Photoshop, use play with the layer Levels to get a good effect.  Remember to reverse it, especially if you add text!  Make a bunch of copies on the same page (try different sizes). Then print it out, and photocopy.  For the ones shown here, I actually printed out the text separately, and put in on first, then put the photo on top of the text, so I get the ‘white’ background behind the text.

Wanna do it yourself? Go get the instructions…

(Past ornament tutorials: Resin Stars, Easy Gift Card Holder, Champagne Chairs, Sweater Photo Frames, Shrinky Dinky Santa)

As a typical 5 year old, he loves Star Wars, Batman, and Phineas & Ferb, and he wanted to be Mr. Freeze (the Batman villain) this year. (As you may remember last year I made Perry the Platypus).  Obviously this is a kid’s version of this costume, but no reason this couldn’t be adapted for an adult as well.  (See more photos on Flickr)

The Mr. Freeze Costume Video at youtube.

Video also available on the Dabbled Facebook Page!

How to Make a Mr. Freeze Costume:

Since this costume is primarily made from recycled materials and thriftstore finds, it may be hard to replicate exactly, but here’s an idea of what we did:

The Husband spent a ton of time on this one… the gun is a modded Hulk watergun, painted with plastic paint. Tubing brings dry ice smoke from the bottles in the backpack. The ‘boots’ are made from sleeves of a puffy jacket–spraypainted silver.  An old kids backpack was also spraypainted silver to hold the water bottles.   Water bottles were recycled Simply Orange bottles. The overall silver outfit was a lucky thriftstore find — it was a Power Rangers costume and we blacked out the Power Rangers logo with fabric paint. The Helmet was a tough one – a friend (Thanks, Anne!) finally found a plastic container for us from some toys that was big enough. Pipe insulation pads the bottom. LEDs on the gun and helmet complete the look!

If anyone is interested, I can get The Handy Husband to write up more about how to make the gun and helmet… and I can also write up more of a tutorial on the rest.

Song credit: Mr Freeze, K’s Choice

This guy as Mr. Freeze, from Dragon-con this year, was the inspiration for The Boy’s choice of costumes

This is a quick method I use for coloring more ‘cartoonish’ drawings… I sketched the drawing in pencil, then went over the line work in ink.  However if you draw your pencil lines dark enough, this method will also let you create an ‘inked’ looking drawing from the pencil sketch.  I use both Photoshop and Illustrator (still on the old CS2, sigh) for this technique.  Click on the illustrations to see them larger.

Tutorial – How to take Line Art to Finished Color Cartoon

Step 1: Scan

Clean up the worst of the stray pencil marks, and scan in your drawing.

Step 2: Levels

Create a new Levels adjustment layer.

Move the white arrow to the left  and move the black arrow to the right (see the Step2 image) until you have a white background and black lines.  This will take a little trial and error, but get it as good as you can.  (If you made any mistakes in your inking, and want to fix them, do it now.)

Step 3: Clean up the Lines

For this illustration, I wanted smoother lines.  (You can skip this step if you like the look of your lines.)  Save the .psd and open it in Adobe Illustrator.

Click on the image, and choose Live Trace.  Check out your lines.  If you want to change them, try other settings from the dropdown box (like Comic Art) or play around with the threshold and min area settings at the top (see step3 image).

Copy, and paste back into your Photoshop image.  (I paste it as a smart vector.  Since it’s now vector, you can resize it if you want it larger, and so forth.)

Step 4: Create a Line Art Layer

I got this technique from the awesome Tom Richmond – Go read the whole thing, but here are Tom’s basic steps:

Yeah, all that is a lot of work, right?  I do this all the time, so I recorded it as an Action in Photoshop, so I just click one button and it’s done!

Step 5: Paint the Color Layer

Now I set up my layers.  I have a WhitePaper layer that is just a solid white layer.  I put all my old layers that I’m not using any more under that.

Next layer up is a blank “Under Color” layer, then a blank “Colors” layer, then my Inks layer, then an “Over Color” layer. (You can see the layer setup in the final image below)

Select your Colors layer.  For quicky coloring, I use the magic wand tool (Sample All Layers checked) to select all of the sections that I want to paint a certain color. Then I have another photoshop action recorded that 1-expands the selection by 1 pixel, and 2-fills with the foreground color. (see step5 image)

Step 6: Paint the Under and Over Colors

You don’t have to do this, but I find it easier for the really small areas (like the suckers on the arms) to just paint on the Under Colors layer.  You don’t have to be neat. (see step 6 image).  I use the Over Colors layer for when I want to paint over the black lines.  Some of my suckers ended up like black dots, so I just painted the green suckers on top!

Below is the final image with the layers.

Katie has given us a great step by step with pictures, but if you have any additional questions, just ask!

Making a Baby Sling

An older baby should sit comfortably on your hip. You only need to fold the sling in about ¼ of the way with an older baby, taking care to keep the 28.5 inch side closest to your body, so the sling makes a pocket.
If the sling is too big, you can easily shorten it by turning it inside out laying it flat and sewing a straight seem at the top to take it up. You can do this in ½ inch increments until you get to a size you like.
It can be helpful to leave the excess fabric when you take it up because it helps you find the top when you are trying to put it on. If you choose to cut it, you will need to sew the seam four times with a zig zag stitch to make sure it is sturdy.

So this was my quickie project for today…

Since my space for my tree is squared off, I made this one a square, but if you tree is in a more open area, you could easily make it octagonal with just one additional step.

Steps:

Procure tablecloth.  Mine was rectangular and 60 inches wide (and 109″ long), which seems a nice size.  1/2 of the width of the cloth will be the distance your skirt will extend from the tree, so plan accordingly, depending on your tree size/space.

It was also regularly $14.99, but marked down to 75% off in the days after Christmas!

So, you’ll need to trim the cloth so it’s 60″ (in this case) square.  You can measure if you want, but my quick method is to fold the tablecloth from one corner into a triangle shape, and trim the excess. Leave a 1/2 inch or so extra since you’ll be hemming the cut side (so your “square is 60″ x 60.5” in reality)

Next, fold in quarters to determine the center.  Mark with a pin.  Cut out according to the instructions below, then hem your rough edges…!  Easy Peasy.  This is a great novice project, because most of your sewing won’t be seen very closely, by the way…

(Click the image to see larger)

I stopped here, but you could always add trim at this point, or embellish in other ways…

Also, your excess cut from the tablecloth would make a lovely set of placemats or a table runner!