Do Parents Still Hand Out Rocks On Halloween?
When I was a kid, half the houses on my block gave out rocks on Halloween instead of candy. Especially if your costume wasn’t up to neighborhood standards. By the time the last porch light was extinguished, we’d be making our way home in the dark, our masks half on and half off, dragging a heavy bag of rubble behind us. And we were happy to have those rocks. Thrilled, even. Sometimes, if you were lucky, some of the houses in the nicer neighborhoods would hand out full-size quartz! You can’t find those just lying around in the street. Charlie Brown can whine all he wants about his Halloween haul, but I’ve never heard of rocks giving anyone cavities or a tummy ache.
Still, despite Charlie Brown’s lack of appreciation for some holiday traditions, Michelle and I thought it’d be fun to sculpt a figure of him in his hole-riddled ghost costume, commemorating his annual walk of disappointment on October 31st. And since we had a few different ideas for the base we wanted to mount him to, we decided to make a mold of the sculpt and cast the figure a few times.
The original sculpt was made from a couple different types of Sculpey with some CosClay thrown in for good measure. The baked result looks like a Frankenstein monster of a figure, half-singed and blistered like a soufflé left in the oven too long. But after some sanding and filing, the little guy was ready to be turned into a mold for resin casting.
After a couple attempts where, despite thorough mixing and brand new resin, the figures contained more bubbles and surface flaws than we were comfortable with, we decided to get even more uncomfortable and spend money on a pressure pot. Few people have seen the pained expression on my face when I have to crack open my stiff wallet because I do it so infrequently. But we got the pressure pot home, hooked it up to the compressor, and got started.
The first batch of castings nearly ended us because, in our haste to see how well they turned out, we forgot to depressurize the tank before beginning to loosen the screw-down bolts on the lid. Internet legend tells of pressure casting gone wrong, pots exploding with surprising force, lids rocketing through the air and nearly taking someone’s head off. But the ghost of Charlie Brown must have been watching over us that day, because at the last minute I remembered to stop and depressurize everything. Am I a hero? I’d like to think so.
We learned a few things that day about pressure casting, and will hopefully continue to learn. One of those things is that the resin squishes out of the mold like crazy under all that pressure and can make a bit of a mess. Another is that the pressure pushes the resin deep into the tightest of seams in the mold, leaving the finished cast with a lot of flash to sand or file off.
But the most important thing we learned was that we could finaly produce a resin cast of a sculpt with minimal bubbles and surface flaws, and we could do it without blowing each other up in a tragic workshop accident.
We cast a handful of the little ghosts and candy sacks, fastened the parts together, and painted them.
So what did we end up doing with these castings? Well, we didn’t toss any into the bags of ungrateful trick-or-treaters, I can tell you that. Those guttersnipes got feldspar. No, we decided to mount each of the castings we made to a different diorama base.
One ghost we set on a sidewalk, making his way from house to house.
Another we imagined cutting across a grassy field toward another, less rock-focused neighborhood.
The third casting we stood on a porch that echoes the small town front stoops you see in the animated special.
This last diorama also has a classic, wrought-iron railing and is decorated with a small, unassuming pumpkin. But that’s not the only thing that helps it stand out from the other two…
In this diorama, the kid under the sheet is so fed up with receiving rocks instead of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups that he has worked himself into a white hot rage so intense that he glows in the dark. That’s the flip side of giving out rocks for Halloween. Sometimes they come back.
To see us sculpt this figure and make the diorama, you can watch the video below.