Detailing Your Haunt – Paint Detailing 101

So I thought I would talk a bit on detailing your haunt since that was the topic everyone wanted more information on from the survey we posted. If you have not taken the survey it is a few posts old now but please do so to let us know what you want to learn more about. With this information we have now prioritized what video footage we will focus on first for our video tutorial series.  Now to the point of this post, detailing your haunt.

Many haunts start out with black walls which works just fine for your generic dark maze type haunt. However if you want to add that old decrepit look then black paint makes it a bit harder to do. Usually you want some sort of lighter color that will show paint and water run marks. You can do this with black but you will have to use a whitish paint to get the effect and the dark greens and reds that work well to make a wall look like blood or sewage has ran down will not show up because it is much darker so you would want a beige or creamish colored wall. These paints can often be found at your local hardware store in their oops paints section and sometimes if you ask around you can get them for free if you take all the oops paint off their hands because they have to pay to dispose of them, in either case these paints are much cheaper if not free and come in all sorts of colors you can use. Greens, browns, off whites, reds all work wonders for doing some detail paint work on walls and in rooms.

So now you have a wall and your paint. Next all you need is a dollar store because you will want to pick up several spray bottles. You will use these to add paint and dilute it with some water. For a cream white colored wall some yellow and brown or red mixed will give a pretty gross look then with the water mixed in and the paint then poured into the squirt bottle you just squirt the paint mixture onto the wall.

• Start at the top of the wall giving a wider spray area horizontally
• Then work the stream thinner as you move down
• Repeat this process over the sprayed area with a seperate spray bottle with maybe a darker or reddish mixture
• Experiement with various color mixes and patterns of spray

This will give you a creepy rotting or running fluid look. If you want you could just spray some of the mixture maybe in a thicker mix over the wall just to give a dirt look. The idea with this is to play with the different color mixes and patterns and thicknesses till you find something you like. To save from wasting lots of paint and squirt bottles use a scrap piece of wood to start with and just practice with a couple squirt bottles and mixes until you get the hang of it. Then you can move on and the worse case is that you have to re base your wall you worked on and start over but in the long run it will give you plenty of experience with this type of painting.

Once again if you have a method or tip please leave us a comment or if you would like to help write a post or do a guest post on a topic let use know. We are always looking for contributors and new information to help new haunters out with.