Day: October 28, 2006

Halloween Craft Links

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Benfrank 

Go check out MAKE’s Halloween blog for plenty of cool Halloween projects–cool pumpkin carving stencils, homemade costumes, DIY scary sound generators, and more. Check out the whole site while you’re there. Good stuff.

The Pumpkin Lady shares lots of cool easy-to-use stencils, including this nifty Shakespeare design:

If you are a socially-challenged misfit with plenty of spare time, go to Raven’s Blight to download PDF how-to’s for constructing paper Halloween toys, like this “Moving Sculpture.”

little fella

Halloween Web has all of your fake-blood-needs covered, including this classic recipe:

Homemade Fake Blood

1 c. Karo Syrup

1 Tbsp Water

2 Tbsp Red Food Coloring

1 tsp Yellow Food Coloring

Mix together in a mixing bowl and you’re done. Try adding blue or yellow for a different shade.

Scary Books–Pt IV

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What are some of your favorite scary books and stories? Please share.

Jeff Smith–Bone

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I got Jeff Smith’s Bone: One Volume Edition in the mail today. I love getting mail, maybe that’s why I love Netflix so much.

This book collects every single issue of Smith’s self-published Bone comic book series, which first came out back in the early nineties…I still have the first couple of issues (think they might be worth anything?)

When Bone originally came out, I was very much into Dave Sim’s Cerebus and other black & white indie comics of a “dark” nature–and despite Dave Sim’s recommendations, Bone was too sweet-natured for me. I couldn’t appreciate Smith’s Walt Kelley-esqe art (the Pogo strip had perplexed me as a kid), and Smith’s layered plot moved too slowly–I realize now it started slow because Smith had all 1300 pages of the series plotted out from the first issue.

A few weeks ago, I was searching through some old graphic novels, looking for a particular Asterix book for some reason, when I came across the first graphic novel in the Bone series, Out from Boneville. I started re-reading it to find that it was waaaaaay funnier than I had realized, and that the art was beautiful and logical and spare and clean. Luckily, Smith has made his work easily accessible, in one big (seriously, this book is heavy) edition.

Will post more on this as I read.