Ever need an army of insects to chow down on your rivals? I required a platoon of giant jungle ants for my haunt. There are commercially available foam-filled latex ant props, but I deemed them to be too huge for my purposes (over a foot long). And the price tag of $25-$30 each would have trashed my meager budget. Here's how I fabricated my little insect friends (or is it fiends?)...
- 2-inch Styrofoam eggs
- 1 & 1/2 inch Styrofoam balls
- 18 gauge florist paper stem wire
- 22 gauge florist wire
- 5/16 inch diameter wood dowel
- Tacky Glue
- Mini-hot glue gun & glue sticks
- Black acrylic paint
- Red Black light paint (optional)
- wire cutter
- hobby saw
You're going to need a lot of ants, so think of this job as an assembly line. Set up to do how ever many critters you wish to build.
Step 1- Cut a 1 & 1/4 inch length of wood dowel.
Step 2 - Gently push a Styrofoam egg onto one end of the dowel and a Styrofoam ball on the opposite end . Don't insert the dowel more than 1/4 inch deep. This section becomes the ant's torso and where the legs will be attached in the next step. Use the Tacky Glue to permanently fix the three parts together and set aside to dry.
Step 3 - For legs, cut 7-inch lengths of paper stem wire. Make leg joints by bending a right angle 1-inch long at each end, creating a knee. Arrange 3 sets of legs into an "X" assembly and hot glue together at the cross axis.
Step 4 - Fashion pincers out of paper stem wire, push these into a proper location on the head. Fix with Tacky glue. Antenna are 2-inch lengths of thin florist wire; glue these to the ant's forehead.
Step 5 - Brush paint (or airbrush) your ant's color. I chose black as a base color.
Step 6 (optional) - Since my critters were to be seen under black light, I chose to dry-brush an additional layer of glow in the dark (black light) acrylic highlights . Once dry and placed in my set, the fierce jungle ants were ready to make guests' skin crawl.
This is a variation of elementary school arts & crafts projects, but worked for my needs. You might wish to add beady eyes or other features as you desire. It required two afternoons for me to fabricate a couple dozen jumbo ants, each being about 5-inches in length. Material cost was approximately $1.00 per ant. This technique can also be applied to creating spiders.
Original Author: The Spectral Traveler (Hilber Graf)
Original URL: http://www.graf-fiticreations.com/Creepy_Props.html