Oversized Halloween Witch Silhouette

Last Halloween my wife showed me a Halloween lawn ornament she liked and asked if I could make one like it. Challenge accepted.

I began by searching on the internet for witch silhouettes. I found an image of one that looked particularly spooky and saved it.

Next, I’d need to make a large print of this. I opened the image in Illustrator to convert it to a vector image, which would allow me to resize it, and converted it with the “live paint” function. Then I removed the fill and added a single-line stroke around the image.

Finally, I resized the image to be approximately 4′ tall, and printed it out. The printout took many sheets of paper, which I then taped to a 4′ x 4′ piece of plywood. This would be my cut guide.

From here, I cut the outlines with a jigsaw, being careful to not slice through the sawhorses below. I’d periodically chop dangling pieces off to keep them from flopping around too much as I made my cuts. 

Finally, I had my plywood witch.

Next, I painted it with a coat of primer (to keep the wood from absorbing the color paint), then a couple layers of black to really accentuate the silhouette aspect.

I added a wedge of wood on the back to create a stand, and put it in my front yard. It looked awesome.

But I knew it could be scarier, so I decided to add a red spotlight behind it, and a fog machine to create an ominous glow. As the sun went down, it really started to show nicely.

And once it got properly dark, the witch really started to show its terrifying aspect. A smash success!