We live behind a photography studio (and no, Toby doesn’t work for them) that constantly fills their dumpster with giant sheets of cardboard. They do a lot of those fancy dancy family portraits that rich people hang over their fireplaces and the frames come in great big six-foot boxes. What this means for us is that we have an endless supply of flat cardboard! My dream medium.

So the other day Bug and I were kicking around with nothing much to do and we decided to make some halloween decorations for our windows. Why not, right? We don’t need no stinkin’ Walmart crap that I have to find a place to store the rest of the year! We can recycle the nice clean trash right next door and have no guilt about throwing it out when the season is over. Or maybe I’ll just give them to somebody else who does have room to store seasonal decorations.

First we sketched out what we wanted to make. Bug drew some kind of robot buddy guy or that’s what she called him anyway. I made my cliche spy cats. It was my way of thumbing my nose at my landlord who made me wash the graffiti cats off the cement wall by our house. She can’t make me take halloween decorations out of my windows I don’t think. Pffft.

Then I cut them out with my handy-dandy box cutter. I love that thing.

After we had a motley collection of scary-looking silhouettes we got out the paint. Black and white for me and green, yellow, pink and purple for Bug. I think we have very different ideas about what Halloween looks like but whatever. I’m all for free form art.

Bug and her buddy had quite a fun afternoon together, just hanging out and relaxing on the cold hard cement.

I love it when we paint together. Everything else in my head just floats away…

Buddy Guy ended up looking scary after all. And yes, I did help a bit. I really need to not do that but sometimes I just can’t help myself. I think he’s kinda cute in a pickly-clown sort of way. You just know any minute he’s going to hop up and say “Boo!”

After the paint dried we took them upstairs and decorated the windowsills with them.

Spooky, no?

I’m kinda partial to the one guarding my dish rack.

Then we just had to wait for it to get dark to take some spooktacular pictures. We probably won’t get any trick-or-treaters this year (we never do) but at least it was fun for us. Maybe we’ll do the same thing for Christmas except with big giant snowmen and flying saucer-sized snowflakes.