How I made my very own Book from Hocus Pocus

Hello my lovelies! I know it's been ages since I've shown you any of my art. I apologise. I've been doing so many events this year that I'm constantly playing catch up it seems. However, I hope this will make up for some of that! As you know, I love Halloween month, and it's fortuitous that Brian has his birthday in October, so we get to have early Halloween parties to celebrate.

This year we decided to do a Hocus Pocus/Salem theme, thanks to my friend Melissa, who came up with it at our party LAST year! (She also came up with next year's theme already, but we'll keep that a secret for now.) Now, since my last name is Sanderson, and I'm a big fan of the movie, I was more than happy to finally become one of the Sanderson Sisters! And since I do have that last name, and was prepared (Obsessive? Compulsive?) enough to shop for my costume by November 1st 2018, I got dibs on being Winifred, haha!

Well, I had the costume for almost a year, but only got around to making Winnie's spell Book recently, as well as practicing my makeup. (I'll do another post about the makeup soon, promise.) Still, I had so much fun with it, and was really proud with how it all came out. 

So, here are a few pics of my step-by-step process, and a video link if you want to see me talking more about it. Happy Halloween everyone!

I was lucky enough to have this awesome fake leather-bound wooden book/box to start from.

The first step was adding layers of paper towel to the front cover, gluing them down with Mod Podge, and then using my fingers to smoosh the layers to make it look more realistic and less flat. I tore the pieces into shapes that approximated the different pieces of skin from the original Book in the film.

 

 

I used a cheap foam eyeball, cut it in half and glued on top of the paper towel, then added small pieces of the paper towel to create eyelids.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I used Black, Burnt Sienna, Burnt Umber and Yellow Ochre acrylic paints to paint the "skin".

I used Fimo modeling clay to create the metal embellishments, and added small jeweled eyes.
I used two full square packs for this project.
After the clay was baked, I superglued the pieces to the Book cover.

 

I then painted the clay pieces in Black acrylic. (Pro tip, buy the correct colour of clay in the first place and you won't have to paint it! I'm an idiot.)I continued to paint the "skin" to make it look more realistic.

 

I used gold glass paint outliner to create all the stitches,
and I used a silver metallic wax on the clay embellishments to make them look more realistic.

 

Ta dah!