We’ve mixed a little Day of the Dead with Halloween this year.
Okay, I think I might just have a chance at legitimately scaring you this Halloween. But before I do, let me show you what ideas we’ve come up with this year for decorating your miniature garden for the big, yet scary, day.
After painting the skull-bead white, we detailed it as best we could with permanent markers (aka Sharpies.) I wanted to redo it and try it again with better details but time was of the essence!
Besides our usual decorations, Steve and I have been loving wonderfully creative sugar-skeletons, or Calaveras as they are called in Mexico, that are now found with Halloween decorations (even though The Day of the Dead is a separate and very different day then our traditional Halloween celebration.)
Sugar Skeletons
The skulls that worked best were the bead-skulls because the features were smoothed-out and easier to color. Fine-tipped Sharpie markers worked the best as our miniature painting skills were so not up to par, especially painting on an uneven surface. The markers allowed Steve to make nice lines and dots exactly where he wanted to.
You can see the other skull that Steve painted up on the picnic blanket. (During The Day of the Dead ceremonies, the Mexicans bring a feast and meet with their friends and family on the graves of their loved ones. Why leave the dead out of the party?)
I can’t remember how this lamppost got so damaged, it was probably our dog’s doing when she was a pup. But I’ve kept it in the Halloween box for this very reason: to scare you. Okay, that wasn’t the big scare… keep reading…
To make a grave stand out in the miniature garden, use a different texture from the rest of the plants for the top of it, like moss used here. Then we didn’t want a deliberate rim of stones around it, it looked too arranged, so we just alluded to it with a few here and there.
Put it on a pedestal and paint it. Have fun in your minaiture garden by bringing something meaningful to it. Glue it to a pedestal and paint it to make it look like a statue. (I glued a tiny twig for the crow to stand on to make a place for him to sit.)
Remember that you can paint your miniature pumpkins before or after they start to fade. If you are diligent about only using them for Halloween, they seldom fade in the sun.
Bird’s eye shot of the garden. This was the farm garden in our Gardening in Miniature book that needed a re-do. We decided to do a Halloween scene in it while we figured out the next scene.
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