The Highbury Cross Tombstone Prop

With less than two weeks to go, I was able to quickly knock this cool little tombstone prop out!

I saw the original 20" foam tombstone two-pack at Lowe's, specifically eyeing the cross tombstone. As I sat and thought about what to do with it, I realized that it was pretty uniform and getting a second stone and gluing them together would give it the thickness and realism that I'm always putting into my cemetery display. So I grabbed a second two-pack and made my way home to get to work on it.

The other stone in the pack was a cool carved woman figure. I'm not sure what to do with them just yet, so they are going into storage in the basement for now...

So the first thing I did was glue the two cross tombstones together back-to-back, and luckily they lined up pretty closely. I then quickly spackled out the seam all the way around, as I wanted this to look like one stone. And after a quick sanding the stone was ready for the next step.

I then took a separate piece of foam and quickly made a simple epitaph, printed it out, attached it to the foam, and then carved it with a Dremel. The finished plaque was then glued to the front of the stone, and once dried was ready for paint.

I gave it my standard three-color paint job: first, a full coverage of dark purple-black (just a color of paint I happen to have on hand), followed by an overall dry brush wash of white (leaving all the recessed areas black and giving the stone a natural, aged grey look), and then finishing with a sparse, dripping patchwork of green to give it an organic, weathered, mossy feel.

The final step was drilling two holes into the bottom and inserting two pieces of old pex-pipe PVC that I had on hand. These pieces act like sleeves that will slide over dowel rods inserted into the ground, holding the tombstone in place.

And before calling it done, I decided to add a coating of dense spider webbing to really give it an aged look. I have been having success with the new Web Caster Gun spider webs on my earlier props this year, so I added another coating of the hot glue webs to this stone. And again, I was really happy with the results.

A completed tombstone in about two days, and the short size of it will fit nicely among the other larger stones, breaking up the uniformity of tombstone sizes across the display.