Good Graveyard Fences Make Good Neighbors

Two years ago I put together my first miniature haunted house. It’s a little wonky, and in need of repair, but most haunted houses are. This October, in an effort to improve curb appeal, Michelle and I built a miniature cemetery on the plot next door, and we experimented with making the headstones out of foam, wood, clay, and cardboard.

Here’s a quick progression of our process on the ever-important cemetery wall. Something’s gotta slow the zombies down. The first step is building the wall from foam, and topping it with a fence made of cocktail sticks and styrene.

Next, we coat it with Mod Podge and black paint to shore it up, and give it a nice, black base coat to paint over.

The bricks are painted in slightly over-saturated colors, but after they’re doused in a black or brown wash they’ll look a lot more appropriate.

The final stage of the wall is dry-brushing with a highlight color to add depth. Eventually, we’ll dab some rust onto the fence because no cemetery fence is complete without a little rust.

We made seven headstones for this graveyard. We wanted to try out different materials and different methods to show that you could use almost anything for a project like this.

Some headstones were foam, some clay, others wood or cardboard. Can you tell which is which?

And as a final nail in the coffin, we wanted to make sure everyone remembered that even a good fence isn’t enough to keep the dead away from your door.

If you want to see how we put together this diorama, and soak up a little more spookiness before trick or treating tonight, you can watch our grave-making process in this week’s video.