My girlfriend wanted Nightmare Before Christmas decorations for Halloween, so we went to Thingiverse and picked out Jack, Sally, and this beautiful diorama of the iconic hill in the movie.
The parts printed out fine, but they did require some assembly. I’m not the most skilled with my hands, so assembling Jack was basically my own nightmare.
Jack requires some slight assembly… 
Putting together the diorama 
Headless Jack 
This was much harder than it should have been
After the aggravating process of epoxying the parts together, I airbrushed them with a white microfiller primer I recently purchased. The fumes ended up being too strong to use indoors, and apparently I didn’t clean out my airbrush thoroughly enough after using it and now two of my guns are clogged. Needless to say, I will be sticking to my acrylic white primers in the future.
Smoosh is unimpressed
After priming, I went ahead and painted the pieces by hand. This is when I realized that I am truly not an artist, and am incapable of painting details like faces…
She’s….beautiful…. 
Jack giving his iconic “talk to the hand” pose
I quickly gave up on even trying to salvage Jack or Sally and instead focused my efforts on the diorama. Luckily, this didn’t require much hand painted detail and went a lot better.
Starting to look like a thing! 
Paint, mod podge, and glitter!
To make it look like I know what I’m doing, I used a technique called “dry brushing” to highlight detail on the gate . And as a finishing touch, I added glitter using mod podge. I am THRILLED with how it turned out, especially since Jack and Sally were extreme failures.
Glitter! 
Glorious glitter! 
So sparkly 
So shiny
Overall, I did a lot better than I expected, but I’m still quite a novice at all this art stuff. I went ahead and printed a ton of tiny hats from Thingiverse, so I’ll go back to annoying Madam Crookshanks in future posts!
The smoosh patiently awaits her hats