Head On A Stick

This is my head on a stick, affectionately known as 'Hans'. He is a prop stave I use as a strolling character (more on that character in an upcoming post) at a Halloween Haunt.

Hans was created using a pre-made plastic skull that I attached to a wooden stave. He was simply a bare skull; I created this delightfully juicy prop by layering tissue and liquid latex over him, and using a hard brush to 'sculpt' finer details, like wrinkles, etc. into his skin before it dried. I sculpted a slightly oblong ball with Sculpey for his eye, and used more tissue/latex to create the look of eyelids. I glued his jaw at an unnatural angle so the whole piece would be that much more disturbing.

I'm sure you can see Hans has a lovely head of..er..hair. This is by far the easiest, yet most unsettling thing I can suggest to add to a prop like this, for some reason putting hair on it just adds a creepiness factor you can't get otherwise. I used strands of wig hair and attached them with gloss varnish for a globby/rotten look.

The ear was from this old toy CSI kit I got a bajillion years ago, to build up clay faces for forensics. I stuck it on there because...well why not. I also thought Hans' gaping eye-hole was boring, so I rolled up some dried latex into little maggot-shaped blobs and stuck them in there with some more varnish. After a simple paint job (dollar store acrylics, mostly brown and black), I glossed Hans up wherever I thought he needed more rotten juicyness, and voila! Threw some twine and fake blood (also why not) on this bad boy and he was ready for haunting! Despite being mostly plastic, he's pretty durable, I've dropped him multiple times and he hasn't broken, though I'm not sure anyone would notice if he did!