Creating Your Own Halloween Village Pieces

I have wanted to create a spooky Halloween village for awhile now. So much fun to build it piece by piece until you have a thriving spook town all your own. Every time I found a piece I loved though, I was put off by the cost. Spending $110 on just one piece like this beautiful Department 56 haunted church just wasn't in the budget.

I decided I would just have to make my own! It started with this discounted Christmas church! Yep, a cheap Christmas village set piece.





I needed to change a few of the churches features. Christmas wreaths, for example, are beautiful at Christmas time, but not so much at Halloween.
I started with some Polymer clay. I used bits and pieces of the clay to cover the cheery Christmas doors, some of the windows, and to create artificial holes in the building.
Because the church is ceramic, I can just stick the whole thing in the oven to bake the new clay additions.
Once the clay was baked and the church had cooled, I took acrylic craft paint and painted pretty much the entire building! I changed the bright cheery red brick exterior to a creepy grey, dry brushed black soot over the bright clean snow, and added some Spanish moss to achieve the overgrown neglected look! I even found some tiny gargoyles at the dollar store to give the building a little more of the creepy vibe I wanted.





So instead of spending $110 for one piece from the name brand collection, I spent $15, plus a little bit of clay and a little bit of paint! For under $20 I have a creepy one of a kind building for my creepy one of a kind Halloween village! Now I can't wait to add more pieces to the collection!
For more specific information and details visit the blog link below.






Original article and pictures take http://www.hometalk.com/9980585/creating-your-own-halloween-village-pieces site