# Revenge Tombstone: Tutorial



## Terra

A sculpture inside a tombstone - sort of. This was my Secret Reapee's gift for sikntwizted and thank goodness he is. I picked his like of 'gore' and went for it. 












View attachment 477489


The back story is that the guy who is entombed in the stone was done so while he was alive. He was buried up to his chest and then the tombstone was formed around him. He struggled mightily as the stone hardened around him. He found himself in this predicament because he murdered a loved one of someone and they got their revenge on him. What's a mystery is why, after all these years, the stone has crumbled away revealing the monster but he still looks fresh and is even bleeding...


Made a video that will help you loads in visualizing the steps needed to make this stone. Please watch:







_Note: Please see the previous Captain Daniel and Raven tutorials for new techniques that were also done for this stone. See Blackbeard's tutorial for a full build tutorial. This tutorial only focuses on what is specific or new for this stone._


*Materials Needed:
*Blue or pink 2" thick foamboard_ (2/3rds of a board)_
23" x 16" plywood
Printer paper
Tape
Latex Drylok _(gray or tinted gray)_
Foamboard glue_ (Glidden Gripper and Loctite foamboard glue)_
Acetone
Wood filler
Ghastly mask: http://www.trickortreatstudios.com/ghastly_ghoul_full_head_halloween_mask.html
Severed arm prop
Severed fingers prop
Great Stuff
1/2" PVC pipe _(two 14" pieces - 32" total)
_Paper towels
Foam Fusion or white glue or waterproof glue
Perma-Blood: http://www.palenightproductions.com/blood.html
Black exterior latex paint - flat
White exterior latex paint - flat
Dark gray exterior latex paint - flat
Black acrylic paint - flat
White acrylic paint
Raw sienna acrylic paint
Burnt umber acrylic paint
Lime green paint _(cadmium yellow acrylic and chromium oxide green acrylic mixed together)_
Phthalo blue acrylic paint
Peach airbrush paint _(Createx)_
Sand airbrush paint _(Createx)_
Dark brown airbrush paint _(Createx)_
Medium brown airbrush paint_ (Createx)_
Deep red airbrush paint (_Createx)_
Matte top coat _(Modern Masters)_
Canary yellow airbrush paint_ (Createx)_
Phthalo green _(blue shade) _acrylic paint
Gloss top coat
Glue sticks
Q-tips
Two 24" rebar rods

*Tools Needed:
*Jig saw
Face mask
Eye protection
Sharpie
Ruler
Photoshop-type program loaded on computer
Rasterbator program loaded on computer
Adobe Reader program loaded on computer
Computer printer
Ruler
Ballpoint pen
Blue painter's tape
Hot Wire Engraver tool
Hot Wire Industrial Knife Kit
Multi-Max Dremel with sander attachment
PVC cutter
Sanding pads
1/4" & 1/2" drill bits
Drill
Paint brushes
Paint scraper
eXacto knife with regular blade and curved blade
Small pointy scissors
Pottery tools
Wire brush tool
Caulk gun
Hot glue gun
Misc. sized brushes including a 3" and 2" angle brush
Plastic cup
Non-reactive plastic container
Painting tarp
Latex gloves
Sea sponge
Ground stakes
String
Wood planks for leveling _(optional)











_*Cut out Shapes* _(picture 1):_ Because this stone is holding a 'real' sized person it has to be thick so use 2" thick foam if you can get it. Cut out four tombstone shapes and one base. The layout on the grid paper above shows you the sizes and shapes you'll need.

*Mock-up* _(picture 2):_ Decide where the face would be located on the stone and draw out with a Sharpie. Stack all the cut pieces together and on the back side of each stone - number them. The front piece is 1_, _the one behind it is 2, the one behind that is 3 and the back piece is 4. This numbers will help you understand what I'm referring to further in this tutorial.














*Cut out Face*_(picture 1)_: Stuff the mask temporally with newspaper to fill it out. Take stone 2 and begin to cut out space for the face on the mask using the 6" Hot knife held at an angle. You want the foam as flush to the mask as possible. Continue to remove foam until you get the mask protruding no more than 2" from the surface of the stone front. Remember, you will be chipping away foam from the front of the tombstone to reveal this face. Once done, hot glue the mask at the front side so the mask is tacked in place.

*Cut and Seal Mask* _(picture 2): _Flip the stone over and cut the back of the mask off with an eXacto knife. Be sure cut it underneath the foam surface so the mask doesn't stick out. Hot glue closed any openings you can in the nose and eye holes. Also seal up the perimeter of the mask. 

*Back of Mask* _(not pictured): _Cut out the back of the head on the mask. Cut off the hair but save it for later. Repeat the same process you did for the front of the mask on stone 4.

*Fill with Great Stuff* _(picture 3):_ Flip both stones 2 and 4 over and fill the cavities with Great Stuff. Overnight you may find that some Great Stuff oozed out of some openings. Pull that off and continue to let cure. This may take a few days. Once it's all cured cut off and shave flush the excess Great Stuff foam on the back of those stones. 















*Carve Face Out* _(picture 1): _Place the face stone (2) and the front stone (1) in the base. Start to chip away the back of stone 1 so the protruding face on stone 2 starts to become flush with the back of stone 1. Take your time here. Again - you want to take away just enough of the foam to have the mask fit into the back of the front stone. Work carefully from each side to determine what foam needs to be removed. 

*Chip Away Face* _(picture 2):_ Once stone 2 is flush with the stone 1, take them back out of the base and lay flat on your workbench. Use the curved blade of an eXacto knife and cut away in chunks the foam so it starts to uncover the face. Use your artistic eye to determine how much of the face you want to uncover. 

Blend in the emerged face with the rest of the stone by continuing to chip away the edges of the hole. Move the blade at different angles to get an authentic chipped stone look fro the foam. Save those bits - you will use them later. 

Do the same process you did for the face now for the back of the head.

*Glue all Together* _(not pictured): _Embed two 14" pieces of PVC into the center of the stones and glue all 4 of the stones together. Use foamboard glue for where the face meets the foam and Glidden Gripper for the flat surfaces. You want to make sure that there is a lot of glue where the face meets the foamboard so it makes a watertight seal. Weight all the pieces down and allow to dry for 2 days.

Check the front of the face to see if there are any gaps where water could get in. Use foamboard glue to seal. If there are very large gaps use some pink snow as filler and seal up with white glue or Foam Fusion. You need to have a watery glue to be able to grab onto that loose snow. Allow to dry.















*Chip Away* (_not pictured):_ A small pointy pair of scissors is good to add an authentic look to the chipped stone. If you stab and drag it will sometimes leave embedded pieces of the foam which looks great. 

*Form Shoulder* _(picture 1):_ Draw the outline of a shoulder on the side of the tombstone. Pick out with a pottery tool to make that shoulder 3D. Sand it smooth with a combo of a sander and green scrubby. Coat the shoulder with wood filler and smooth out with a wet latex-gloved hand. Dabble the surface with the glove to help it get the texture of skin.

*Form Hand and Fingers* _(picture 2):_ Position the hand where you'd like it protruding from the base and mark what you need to cut away from the hand. Start to pick away the foam so the hand will fit in the space but be sure that you again have a tight seal so when you chip more away it will look like the hand truly was emerging from the foam. Insert the thumb into the backside of the base.















*Design Epitaph* _(picture 1): _Type out the epitaph in Word. The phrase, _"Murder Loved Ones - Loved Ones Murder You" _is the Berylium font sized 80. The phrase, _"REVENGE Hardens to Stone"_ is also the Berylium font but 100 size. The graffiti phrase, _"I Know It's You"_ is the Chiller font. Most of it is sized 200 but the _'I'_ is 300 size. The skull is a pirate skull found on the web and was printed out poster sized in the program, Rasterbator. The handkerchief hat will not be used on the stone - the skull design is what's cool. Lay all of your print outs on the stone to be sure that they won't obstruct each other too much. The story is that the tombstone's epitaph was already carved in and the guy who took his revenge came back later and graffiti'd the stone with, _"I Know It's You". _Then after that is when the stone started to crumble away. The trick is to try to convey the story with all these layers of design.

*Carve Epitaph* _(picture 2): _There are many ways to carve an epitaph: use a Dremel, use a Hot Wire Engraving tool, use an eXacto knife... I thought that the eXacto knife was the best way to show a realistic epitaph for this particular stone. Be sure that your eXacto knife is a fresh blade or it makes this work a little more difficult and you won't get as clean of a cut. Plunge the knife at an angle toward the center of the epitaph and cut down on one side of the letter. Do the same cut for the other side of the letter. Remove the paper and pick out out the cut pink foam with a pottery tool to reveal the epitaph. Do this for the_ 'Murder' _and _'Revenge'_ epitaphs. For the _'I Know'_ epitaph just trace it out with a Sharpie. You will apply the graffiti to the stone later after painting. The Sharpie may show a little through all those paint layers so it's more as a guide for you if it shows enough. I had peeks of it here and there on my stone. Carve out the skull design using either a Hot Wire Engraving tool or a Dremel.















*Glue Base* _(not pictured): _Glue the base to the plywood bottom that already has the holes cut out for the rebar _(see previous tutorials)_ and then glue the stone to the base all using the foamboard glue. Weight down while drying overnight.

*Chip Out* _(picture 1 & 2): _Go around the rest of the stone and chip away the fingers like you did for the face, shoulder and back of head. You can also add in an extra area that shows nothing but gives the impression that he was breaking out there too. I picked the back bottom left corner. Still save those extra stone pieces. 

*Shape Base* _(picture 1): _The idea here is to give the impression that this was just a mound of the cement formed around the tombstone face. First shape it to be more rounded using the SureForm Shaver.

*Chip Base*_ (picture 2): _Second, poke the heck out of the base using that small pair of scissors to give it that gravel appearance.

*Acetone, Cracks and Wood Filler* _(not pictured):_ Do the acetone treatments, cut out cracks and fill in score lines or seams with wood filler. These steps were explained in previous tombstone tutorials.
















*Glue on Stones*: Foamboard glue on those reserved stone pieces you were saving. Place them near the edges of the exposed surfaces of the body. You are giving the impression that as the monster was struggling mightily he was weakening the concrete and over time they finally broke away and crumbled to the ground. Some still are barely hanging onto the surface of the stone. This will also help give the illusion that there is indeed a body inside this stone. 

Place a large glop of foamboard glue and press on a handful of the stone pieces at the base where that crumbling occurred. Go back over the pile and breathe lightly to see which stones didn't catch onto the glue and pull off. Also glue in some random stones onto the plywood base and next to piles of stones.

Go back over any glue seams and scrape the excess away to help make it look more like loose stones and not mortared ones.

_Important! _Take a picture of the face. You are getting ready to paint over it and you'll need this picture as reference to paint it back to life.




View attachment 477497

_All ready for paint!_​













*Two Coats of Drylok*: You are going to paint two coats of Drylok and as usual make sure you leave downward strokes so the grain is vertical. But, change the direction of the grain on the crumbled gravel. Make sure it's all different angles to help sell the idea that this is tumbled concrete. 

Also, dabble the surface of the body while the Drylok is still wet so you leave behind a skin texture.

*Paint Epitaph & Cracks:* This font is very small so use straight flat black paint to have it show better. Also paint in the cracks with the black paint. At spots very near the surface of the crack - paint in the illusion of a crack so in the center between the line and the crack looks to have a tiny _'stone'_ left behind. Noticed this while staring at real cracks in the cement in my basement. There are tiny islands of concrete in those cracks - makes me want to get a beach chair and a margarita....

*Paint Black Lines:* Paint thin flat black lines at the seams of the crumbled stones and edges of the emerging body. This will help separate and give the illusion that there is space there.

*Tea-stain and Accent Colors* _(not pictured):_ As explained in previous tutorials - do two sessions of black tea-stain. Paint the accents of black where any gravel is to help make it look different from the surface of the concrete and also accent holes and flaws to_ 'deepen'_ them. Streak some raw sienna _(lichen)_ and paint some hits of lime green (moss) when the stone is dry. It will look too vibrant now bit will be toned down after subsequent steps of tea-staining and drybrushing. 

While tea-staining, you may want also want to try what was shown in the video. While the last coat of tea-stain is still wet on the stone use more paint than water and dabble on some of the areas. Because the surface is still wet - the paints bleeds into the stone in very cool ways. Another new idea was to take the regular tea-stain and fling it on - that left a cool look too. 

_Tip:_ Add a drop or two of dish washing liquid to your tea-stain. This breaks up the surface tension and allows the paint to really get into deep crevices on your stone.















*A Color Lesson:* Picking colors can be a daunting task. Pick the wrong ones and it just looks bad. The viewer may not know why but the artist should. Spend a lot of time understanding how color works if you are new to painting. The best way is to get yourself a color wheel. There are go-to color relationships and the color wheel does a great job explaining them to you and will help guide you to good color combinations. 

Here, we are getting ready to pick what color you want to use for the graffiti phrase, _"I Know It's You". _There are already two colors chosen for you. The face _(a yellowish tone) _and blood _(red). _Look at your color wheel and see what would be a complimentary color to those two colors. It would be Blue. These three colors are called a *Triad* meaning they are evenly spaced on the color wheel. They naturally compliment each other so it will look right to the viewer. But, you aren't done choosing yet. The triad color scheme can look very vibrant and so you have to spend some time balancing those colors right. Let one color dominate and tone down the others. Well, obviously we can't tone down the blood and the face color is already toned down so we also have to tone down the blue. Pictured above are three blues that were in my paint arsenal. The blue on the left and right is too loud but the blue in the center looks great _(Phthalo Blue). Note: _Worse case I could have toned down the other blues with white, gray or black. But the Phthalo Blue looked great right out of the jar - bonus!

Cut out the inside of the printed graffiti printout to make a stencil guide and paint the graffiti using the blue that you chose.














*Drybrush: *Use slightly-grayed white to drybrush the stone. Pay good attention to the crumbled gravel to help it stand out more.

*Repaint Graffiti:* Paint another coat of the graffiti to keep it still visible.

*Third and Forth Tea-stain:* These tea-stains have a little less black in it and some raw sienna and burnt umber added. Also be sure to add in that drop or two of dish washing liquid to help break up the surface tension. You also get a very cool effect with these tea-stain steps. The raw sienna and burnt umber separates a little where it's pooled up in the holes of the gravel on the base. Use a Q-tip to suck that up and left behind is a cool mud color and texture. Perfect!















*Repaint Body*: Use that reference photo to guide you on what colors to use to repaint the face and the rest of the body. I'll describe what I did but this is using colors and brands I happen to have in my painting arsenal - you will most likely have different paints. Use the colors that looks good to you.

Use white straight out of the paint bottle to paint the eyes, fingernails and teeth. Do several coats and this will help smooth over the texture of the Drylok left behind. 

You can use a mix of raw sienna and white for the skin. It will be a bit orangy bit don't worry - it will be toned down shortly. Be sure to use your paint brush to dabble the paint on to maintain that skin texture.

Mix the peach _(Createx)_ and sand _(Createx)_ colors and paint over the skin again. This helps tone down that orange. 

Mix dark brown _(Createx), _medium brown _(Createx)_ and a little deep red _(Createx)_ into the matte top coat (Modern Masters). Glaze everything but the teeth and eyes. this will help to add depth and realism to the skin

Mix just dark brown _(Createx)_ with the matte top coat (Modern Masters) and re-trace lines on the skin, eye sockets, teeth and nose. Don't forget the fingers and back of head.

Mix peach _(Createx)_ and sand _(Createx) _and matte top coat_ (Modern Masters) _and paint over everything again including the eyes and teeth. This continues to add realism to the skin.

Re-do the eye sockets, nostrils, inside mouth and lips an additional two times using the dark brown/medium brown/deep red glaze you made before. Also re-do some of the lines with the dark brown glaze to give you better definition. 

Mix canary yellow_ (Createx)_ with the matte top coat _(Modern Masters) _and paint over the eyes and teeth. This will yellow and age them.

Draw an iris-sized circle over the center of the eyes and trace out with a pencil. Paint in using Phthalo Green _(blue shade). _Paint in center of iris with lime green and blend out to the edges of the iris.

Use clear gloss around the tear ducts, eye itself, mouth, nostrils and teeth.

*Repaint Black Lines:* Repaint any black spacer lines that got muddied up with all this painting. Do the space where to body shows through the stone and the edges of any loose gravel. Repaint the inside of the cracks as well.

*More Raw Sienna:* Finally, add a few streaks of raw sienna where you had previously painted it to make it stand out a bit more.

















*Glue Hair *_(picture 1): _Cut the reserved hair to be about 2" long. Brush on some thinned glue on the bottom third of the head and evenly spread the hair along it while applying more glue. Spread another layer of glue above that and place some more hair. Keep doing that until the back of the head is thinly covered with hair. Note: If this stone will be outdoors - use a waterproof clear glue for this step.

*Blood* _(picture 2): _Dribble on some blood in small areas. The top of the shoulder, side of the back of the head, where the fingers are poking out, side of the mouth and one of the eyes. Add enough blood where it dribbles down the tombstone face. Don't go overboard with blood. A pet peeve is when a prop is darn near covered in blood. A little adds so much more of a shock then too much.

*Moss* _(not pictured): _Hot glue in some moss at the top of the stone and some on the sides.















Whoo hoo! We are done with this gory tombstone - fun.​


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## ZombieCupcake

This is so amazing! You're really talented. *?*


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## Terra

Thank you  I plan on updating this tutorial in the next few weeks but here is a quick link to the pictures that were included in this tutorial: https://www.halloweenforum.com/media/albums/tutorial-revenge-tombstone.7860/


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