Countdown to Halloween: Paper Sculptures

Nothing better than paper sculptures for home decor.  Or doll house decor.

It's Nora again, this time with our fanciest display pieces yet.  We wanted something a little fancier than just tiny pumpkins (though we have those too), so we pestered the human until she found just the right designs to make in miniature.

Fun fact:  lots of papercrafts weren't meant to be made at a smaller scale...  These three display pieces took the human about 3 days to finish.  We'll share the sources for these sculptures, and then remind our lovely readers that these are much much harder to make than the usual printables we give out.  '4-8 hours per sculpture, and you'll want to use tweezers' complicated.  The human thinks they're well worth the time, and since we get the decor, we think it's worth it too.

All of these were from Canon Creative Park.  (The human is not affiliated in any way with the company.  She just loves the free designs and shrinking them down for us.)  To shrink them down, go the layout settings when you're printing and select either 'print 2 pages to a sheet' or 'print 4 pages to a sheet'.

First off, the Halloween scene.  This has 5 individual characters (a witch, a cat, a ghost, a jack o' lantern, and a skeleton) on a house.  The characters are about 1" tall.  They were...complicated...  (The human later compared the characters to her Dungeons and Dragons miniatures.  They were the same size.  Certain language inappropriate for young ladies was used loudly at this discovery.)

The original from Canon Creative Park

Print this at 4 pages to a sheet for the size shown here.  

Use a lightweight cardstock.

Next up is our Halloween tree.  The trunk, branches, and base are made from cardstock.  The lanterns and bat are made from normal paper because cardstock is too heavy for the curves.  This is another design from Canon Creative.  There's 9 little lanterns, 4 pumpkins and 5 monster faces.

The Halloween Tree from Canon Creative Park

Print this at 4 pages to a sheet for the size shown here.  

And finally, our absolute favorite new toy (and the human's too):  Jack and the Halloween dancers!
The jack o'lantern top moves up and down and you can see all the little figures inside.  You move it by spinning the skull knob in the front.  How does it move?

The base has a complicated paper gear mechanism inside.  There's 6 vertical rods all linked together from front to back, each with a slightly different height and turning radius.  It's a rather neat little bit of paper engineering.

There is a ghost, a cat, a bat, a witch's hat, and a skull that move up and down inside the jack o'lantern.  Amazingly enough, we have yet to break it despite much manhandling of the turning mechanism.  (We were a little afraid we were going to break it before we had a chance to show it off, in all honesty...)  This is printed at 2 pages to a sheet, because the human was not willing to try to make paper gears quite that small.  This was also the 8 hours and lots of fiddly bits craft, but you didn't have plans for the weekend anyways, right?

Jack and the Halloween Dancers, from Canon Creative Park

Print this at 2 pages to a sheet, on cardstock

BOO!