Halloween 2003

Styrofoam Workshop

Styrofoam. You know it. You love it. But what to do with it? Well, when the Southern California Haunter's Society gets together with The Castle Crew, styrofoam gets cut, melted, painted, and otherwise tourtured into anything from tombstones to castle or dungeon walls. In this workshop, The Castle's castellan Dave gave a workshop on his technique for quick-and-easy stone walls made from styrofoam. Afterwards, he showed that by removing the tip from a 60-watt soldering iron and replacing it with a short piece of heavy-gauge copper wire, you create a hot-wire styrofoam cutting and sculpting tool.

Dave starts his "stone wall" demo by showing how a store-bought form for making a concrete walkway....

...can be used as a template when pressed into a slab of styrofoam. These "grout lines" are then traced over with masking tape.

After painting the slab with gray exterior latex paint, the masking tape is removed.

The "grout lines" are then painted with black spraypaint. The acetone in the paint melts the unpainted styrofoam, creating recessed "grout lines" between the "stones".

Dave displays the finished section!

After everyone had shoved copper wire into a soldering iron, we all took turns cutting and carving on a scrap of styrofoam.