Halloween Zombie Link

For Halloween I wanted to make something unique and that didn't cost too much to make. I finally decided on a wood cut-out for my front yard, and a zombie link design. I'm a big fan of the Legend Of Zelda games and the picture I found looked really cool and most possible despite my limited free hand drawing ability.

48" by 96" 11/32 plywood cut down to 60" by 42"

2x4 I had one long piece that I cut down, but you need 3 pieces total 2 at 4' one at about 3 1/2'

Paper and a printer for the image

Poster board

Glue for the poster board

Tape

Razor blades

Sand paper to smooth out lumber surfaces and pieces

Paint

Paint brushes

Polyurethane or something similar to finish your project

Rebar ( I bought a 3/8 by 10' length and cut it in half)

A consistent thing I see in a lot of instructables is a price break down, or comments for an estimated cost.

My cost for this whole project was at around $25, but I had the majority of the materials already from other projects and stockpiles, but if you started fresh I cant see it costing more then $40 or so, mostly in paint if your buying quality, but even the cheaper paint adds up because it takes more of it,but the hunk of wood was $15 and I have enough left over for another cut-out I wanna do, and the Rebar was $4, poster board will set you back another $2-3. Paintbrushes very,but you want to make sure you have a quality paintbrush for lining so your image will look as clean as possible, lets call that another $5-10, then the rest is miscellaneous materials i.e sand paper, glue, razor blades.

I found a really cool looking design by image searching "Zombie Link" on Google, I then found a website that will take any image and size it out according to sheets of paper wide and long, then prints them out a page at a time like a puzzle, this made this part much easier because I had a more consistent image then if I tried to blow it up percentage by percentage. I then took those individual pieces of paper and glued them onto poster board. (I could get four pieces of paper on one sheet of poster board)

Link To Image:

http://nappydread.deviantart.com/art/Zombie-Link-2...

Website that blows up image and pieces it out like a puzzle:

http://www.blockposters.com/

Using a razorblade I cut out the black out line from the image in order to use it as a guide for when I transfer it to the piece of wood, having it on poster board made this step a lot easier because it stood up to force, and didn't tear as easy.

I went to my local home improvement store and had them cut a sheet of plywood down to the size I needed, sanded it smooth and painted it white so my colors would show up better.

I used painters tape and secured the image to my board, I then painted all the parts I had previously cut out with black paint, once that was finished I continued to cut out black lines and paint them until I had a complete image. (I was serious about not being able to free hand lol).

Now at this point I had a pretty sweet coloring book page and all I had to do was color it.

as far as the colors, I tried to match the original the best I could, but you can color it whatever colors you want. I made some changes to the original image because I was having issues with making the face look right, so I just gave up and painted over it and put blood spatter, still looks pretty good, I also changed the shield image because I thought the mirror shield from the games better fit a Halloween theme, then tried to remember everything I could from Bob Ross and painted clouds and grass, I only did this to fill up empty space, and felt that cutting it out would create an awkward shape because of the addition of the fairy, but being Link the fairy was absolutely necessary for me.

A tip for the paint that my dad taught me, if you go to your local Home improvement store, and get samples from the paint department it is a cheaper way to get quality paint, usually only $2-3 a sample.This whole project maybe used a 1/4 of the black and not much of any of the other paint because the coverage was so good, and by using this method I've accrued a decent paint collection for future projects.

I used polyurethane to protect the image because it is going in my front yard, I built the stand out of 2x4's and rebar.

to form the stand I cut out 2 lengths of 2x4's at 4', and a third at about 3' to bridge the gap between the 4' 2x4's, then drilled 2 holes in the 3' 2x4 at 1/2" for the 3/4" rebar to pass through, I secured everything with small nails from a nail gun through the front of the project so there would be no noticeable blemishes,I used screws for the 2x4s,then drove the rebar through the holes and into the ground.