In the movie, there are several gates which have stone columns on either side. I wanted to capture this in the design for this year’s Halloween house..

Fortunately, I have had columns in the designs for previous years and was able to re-use the wooden column understructures. I did a little shimming to get things level, and we were ready to begin.

From there, I brought out some rectangular Styrofoam covers which I had cut and glued together, and which fit snugly across the front of the wooden structures. I referenced images from the movie to sketch out the locations of the different stones.

From there I used a square shaped cutting tool on my hot knife to cut the grooves between the stones.

In addition to carving the grooves, I also created some chips and cracks in the Styrofoam to make it look like weathered stone.

Then it was on to painting! I painted the grooves of the stone dark gray.

And then painted the surfaces of the stones light gray. Not only did this replicate the look of shadows within the grooves of the stone, but it also matched the color scheme for the low stone wall.