Maura's Creative Adventure: I made Slimer out of an old halloween pumpkin and a bunch of foam

I saw a sad looking Halloween pumpkin decoration sitting on my front porch, and deciding on a whim that I could do better. Lots of spray foam and a bit of paint, no problem!

I started with drilling a couple of holes into the side of the pumpkin so that I could add wire that will become the skeleton of the arms. I'll add more wire later to form the hands

The skull face kept staring at me, plus it was in the way, so it had to go.

If I had to do over again, I would have built up the plastic pumpkin with card board to fill it in more before I started in with the spray foam. (The can works better if you hold it upside down, you know, like the directions say to do. I'm not great with direction. Don't read into that.)

I didn't think about how I was going to hang Slimer until now. Or else I would have added a wire before adding the foam.

Time to carve. I went through lots of tools I have in the shop to find the right ones. I found anything serrated worked great. I used an old hand saw to cut big chunks off. And an old steak knife, that will never be used for food again, for carving smaller bits.

This process was a bit tedious. I carved, then added more foam, carved some more, then added more foam. Rinse and repeat.

And I got to carve a but crack. Not sure that has ever come up before in my creative adventure. But here we are, using a hand saw to carve a foam sculpture of Slimer. I have a weird life.

More foam, more carving.

For the arms, I beefed up his biceps with some scrap EVA foam. I used contact cement to close the cylinder, and hot glue to attach it to the body. It's all going to be covered up in more foam, so I wouldn't particularly careful with getting the seams perfect, or the hot glue strings, which are pretty much unavoidable anyways.

Another scrap piece of EVA foam to form the bottom of the mouth. Attached it with a ridiculous amount of hotglue.

I use a thinner gauge wire to shape out the skeleton of the hands. I start with a kind of triangle shape to form the palm of the hands, then start adding in fingers.

I add a BUNCH of foam clay to the entire body. For the most part, I am just putting an even coat over the entire foam sculpture. On a few spots, like the shoulders, I'm adding extra foam where I didn't build up the foam well enough.

Ater I get the whole thing covered in foam, I came back the next day to start adding the teeth. I used 6mm EVA foam to form them. I cut each piece with an xacto knife, and sanded the edges with the dremel, and attaching them with CA glue and activator to speed up the process.

There is an edge to the teeth that I didn't want, so I rolled out skinny worms of clay, and pushed it against the gum line.

The eyes are a single ping pong ball cut in half and hot glued on. Then used skinny worms of clay at the top and bottom to form the eye lids.

Added more little bits of foam clay to add more expression to Slimer's face. The only reason the color goes from white to grey is that I ran out of the white clay and had grey next. It is all going to get painted, so it really doesn't matter.

For the tongue, I took a large chunk of aluminum foil, shaped it, and covered it in more foam clay. I was able to add a decent amount of texture with silicone tools dipped in water. With foam clay, it will kind of flatten out a bit as it dries. So go more exaggerated on the texture than you think you should. It will soften out a bit.

Adding lots of little details all over the place.

Next, I sprayed him down with a primer, so I can get going on my favorite part of the hole thing, painting. I used a filler primer.

I like to start painting with a dark version of the final color, then work painting it progressively lighter until I am happy. It's a process that I like. It's probably not the most effecient, but I find it give it a lot of depth and variation.