Home Depot 12 Ft. Skeleton Upgrade

Something that I have noticed this year is that EVERYONE around me has a Home Depot 12 Ft. Skeleton in their front yard now. Heck, some people have two or more! I was suffering from FOMO (fear of missing out) last year, so I ended up biting the bullet and buying one for my display, too. (Really I wanted to add one because I realized that my display was lacking in anything over 7 feet in height and I needed something to break the flat, limiting, horizontal feel of the cemetery setup...)

Immediately upon buying it, I already knew that there was no way that my display would have just another 12 ft. skeleton plopped into it. At this point, these skeletons have become so commonplace you almost ignore them in any display. (Personal opinion, of course...)

So to get mine to stand out, I decided that I wanted to have a 12 ft. corpsed, cloaked reaper!

I started with the basic assembly, but did a tried-and-true drop cloth and heatgun corpsing technique to the head and neck, the only features of the skeleton that would be visible.

After attaching the stained, dried flesh corpse head, I wrapped the entire figure in a black fabric hooded cloak, complete with creepy cloth to give it a few different black hues and to give it extra textured layers. After pinning all of the fabric sections together, it was time to drop him into the front yard.

He now sits at the beginning section of the cemetery display, the first thing you'll see as you come up the street for trick-or-treat. He guards over a coffin that will contain an old skeleton with internal lights and fog, and the entire scene is bathed in a new LED green strobe light. I'm running out of time for this year, but the next step will be to add some sort of wooden staff to his hand. I'm leaning toward some sort of illuminated lantern, but we'll see...

I'm super excited to see the new skeleton reaper in position, and with the simple upgrades will definitely bring a little something extra compared to the sea of out-of-the-box 12 ft. skeletons that everyone else has.

As my young neighbor says, "Uhh.. creepy cool?"