Creep Up A Skull

I've been looking for a skull for a while, and found one at Dollar Tree.

It looked cheap, obviously being from the dollar store, but I thought I could improve the lame skull into something better.  The worst was the mouth, just a single black swipe of paint across the mouth--looked pretty crappy.

So here's the difference:



The first thing I did was paint the back of the mouth and nose holes black with acrylic craft paint.

Then the teeth cream.

I found that I had metallic gold paint, so thought a few gold teeth would make this look like a pirate skull.

Next I used brown paint to add skull sutures. Just squiggly lines on the skull where bones fuse.

Then I tried to add brown dimension with watered paint, but it didn't work.

So to shade the skull, I used brown shoe polish and a stipple brush to make the skull look more dimensional.

I thought it looked a lot better than the plain plastic.

After it was finished, my little guy looked it and said: "Mean pirate!" So I guess at least for him, I met the goal to make it creepy, and a pirate.