I really enjoyed making this Halloween silhouette scene. When I described it to my co-worker Jim prior to showing him a picture, he decided to call it my Halloween Hellscape which had me laughing. He was laughing too when I showed him the picture.

I’ve wanted to do a large scale Halloween decoration since we moved into this house and am always eyeing the garage door as a giant canvas for something. This year, I had the mental space to process a fleeting idea and put it in action.

When I Googled “Halloween decoration garage door” I found an image and an old blog post from someone that had created a scene cut out of plywood with lights fixed behind it to create a backlit effect. This lady screwed the whole scene to her garage door with what looked like a killer result.

When I read through her article, she mentioned using a Dremel which I happen to have but have never plugged in. I’m not even sure where it came from. And certainly, was not sure how to use it. But of late, when something feels right and I can get my hands around it, I go for it.

As our garage door goes up and down 342 times per day (thank you children), screwing a collage of plywood to it would not be a great idea. But our neighbor has a sort of decorative wall that runs along the front property line. It’s about 4 feet high and nearly 30 feet long. Perfect.

I really liked the scene I got this inspiration from with the witches over the cauldron – very Halloweenie. But I wanted to sort of make it more personal. Sarah’s a tremendous cook and we joke that I bought her a “witch’s cauldron” several birthdays ago so she could make her Bolognese by the truck load. I even had to buy a comically large spoon with which to stir her secret potions.

Ok, so the witch over the cauldron is Sarah cooking. Since my role in the kitchen consists of drinking beer, a wizard quaffing a spooky brew only seemed apropos. For the 3 tiny humans bopping across the center I did some more digging into The Almighty Google and found a perfect silhouetted graphic that I worked off of. With that in mind, I got to sketching the design on paper and added in some trees, a spooky cat, pumpkins and an owl.

With approval from the family on the look of the thing, I got to sketching the scene out on the stack of plywood I picked up at Lowes. Looking back, I should have sanded the surface to make this part easier. Once I had it about right, I ran a Sharpie over it so I could see what was I doing with the Dremel. Cutting it out with the Dremel was effective but my hand felt like it was made of stone when I was done. Holding on to this tool spinning at 30,000 RPM while it cut apart wood was, um, intense. Next time – JIGSAW, duh.

With it cut, I did a quick sanding and started painting. From there I made some brackets on the back to fit over some long ground stakes. Then I stapled the lights to the back which was quite a process. But I’m feeling confident they’ll not be coming off anytime soon.

I’m glossing over a lot here but I’m tired of writing and wanted to get this out there. I really love the way this thing turned out and think I’ll keep making them for other holidays!