Okay, so you can project light onto a canvas to easily try out an idea. I decided to try one more Halloween costume: Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

I started by finding a high-resolution version of The Scream. Next I projected the painting onto a canvas:

Then I took a pencil and traced the strokes of color in the painting. Afterwards, the canvas looked like a giant paint-by-numbers kit. Here’s one part of the traced results:

The tracing was a little too detailed, as it turns out. If I were doing it again I wouldn’t be as meticulous. I bought an acrylic painting set at the local craft store and spent a couple hours over a couple days painting my version of the The Scream. Here it is side-by-side with the real thing:

The idea behind this costume is to make the painting three-dimensional. So I cut up my painting so I could stick my head through it. Here’s what the quick-and-dirty test looked like:

It looked about right! So now it was time for… drumroll… the face paint! My first instinct was to make my entire face green like The Hulk. But my wife was nice enough to apply the face paint so that it actually mirrored the paint strokes for the person in the painting. And that’s how you get a Halloween version of The Scream:

We took a bunch of photos, so I’ll include an animated version too:

Overall, I’m happy with how my 2014 Halloween costume ideas turned out. Other than The Scream, all the prototypes were quick and easy (under 15 minutes and under $15). A couple of the ideas were silly, but I had fun getting creative, painting a little bit, and tinkering with my projector.

I already talked about using a projector to prototype a Halloween costume. One Halloween idea that worked out better than I expected was Jack Nicholson from The Shining. Remember the scene when Jack axes his way through a door, announcing “Here’s Johnny!”? It looked like this in the movie:

I started by letting some stubble grow out, and on the day I took the picture, I left my hair messy. I also ordered a plastic axe.

It turns out that this picture was perfect for a long canvas I had. I used Pixlr to edit Jack out. In a quick test, it looked like this:

That’s when I realized for a light projector, you want to edit out with white, not black. A little more work and I was quite happy with the results:

Let me tell you, it only got more creepy from there:

Oh, did I forget my axe? Let’s bring that into the scene:

I didn’t bother to paint or print out anything for the canvas, but overall, it was fun to play with a potential Shining costume for a little while:

Happy Halloween, everyone!