Building a T-Rex

What would a Jurassic Park-themed Halloween house be with out a T-Rex? I wanted to make sure that visitors to the house on Halloween had the thrilling experience of looking up at a life-sized T-Rex. But how to do it?

I thought of a variety of methods, but ran across Boon from Anyone Can Sculpt, an artist who builds monsters and other large creatures out of foam. He showed techniques of working with upholstery foam, Spandex and spray adhesive to create highly detailed sculptures. As a person who is always wanting to grow in my crafting skills, I wanted to try these techniques for this year’s house to learn how to do this. I decided to just build the head and neck of the T-Rex and have it coming out of trees to create a menacing effect, without having to build the entire T-Rex body.

The first stop was getting the materials. I did some calculations and then visited my local fabric shop, which happened to have lots of rolls of upholstery foam (ended up buying all they had). I also picked up some black Spandex and several cans of high-strength spray adhesive.

From there, I started with Boon’s T-Rex starter patterns. Using a projector, I enlarged the patterns so that the T-Rex head would end up being nearly 6 feet long. I used a sharpie marker to draw the cutting lines and details onto the foam.

Once I had all the patterns drawn on the foam, it was time to cut them out. We had one of our community build days that weekend, so some neighbors and friends helped with cutting out the large pieces of foam.

From there, I moved into the carving portion of the project. In this case, the skin details of the T-Rex were ‘carved’ into the foam using a soldiering iron (I did this outside, with lots of ventilation and a respirator.) This took many hours, carving each bump and scale into the many foam pieces.

After the carving came the ‘skinning’ or gluing black spandex to each piece. This involved using spray adhesive to spray both the Spandex and the upholstery foam, letting each side dry, covering the foam with the Spandex, and then working the Spandex into the crevices of the foam to bring out the details.

Once each piece was skinned, I then attached the pieces together, again using spray adhesive to glue the edges together. As the pieces came together, I found myself needing to climb inside the head to build it. The end product was an all-black T-Rex head, ready for eyes and painting.

For the eyes, I used clear spherical Christmas ornaments and painted the dinosaur eyes on the inside of the ornament (this keeps the shine on the outside). Once those were done, I glued them into the T-Rex head (and covered them in painter’s tape while I painted the rest of the head.

The T-Rex teeth were also created out of foam. I cut tiny triangles, and glued the edges together so that they formed semi-rounded, but pointy teeth. I then painted them white in preparation for adding them to the mouth.

For painting, I did a dry-brush technique – just picking up a little bit of paint and brushing it lightly over the surface of the head. This had a wonderful effect of bringing out all the skin details that were carved into the upholstery foam. Since the Spandex was black, that dark color served as the shadows within the cracks of skin, and my olive green and yellow acted as highlights on top of the skin, giving really intriguing contrast and (what I thought) was a great look!

Once everything was dry, I mounted it on a protruding beam which I affixed to a beam attached to the house and ground. We sourced large (some were 10 ft. tall!) banana leaves from a generous neighbor’s yard and also pulled in some branches from a tree in our back yard, to create a jungle from which the T-Rex was emerging.