A book of spells can be a appropriate Halloween prop.
Halloween is the spookiest time of year and what better way to add to the scary atmosphere than to make an ancient spell book. You can frighten your friends with spells to conjure up long dead corpses from the graveyard or cast a spell to put a charm on your candy. A spell book is fairly easy to make but you will need to spend some time to get it just right. How scary, funny or downright terrifying it is will be up to you.
Instructions
Preparing the Pages
1. Mix together in a plastic pot a tablespoon of brown paint and a teaspoon of white paint. You are trying to make a sepia color to make the pages of the book look old. Add more brown to make it darker, more white to make the color lighter.
2. Add water to your paint mixture to really thin it down. To age the book you do not want to coat the pages but just add a hint of sepia.
3. Place newspaper underneath the first page of your book. Dip your brush in the thinned paint mixture and paint the first page with long brush stokes going horizontally across the page, until the whole page is covered. Repeat this step on every page of the book.
4. Stand the book open to dry. You could place a towel on the radiator and stand the book on top; if the weather is fine stand it outside on a piece of newspaper.
Decorating the Cover
5. Choose a good title for your spell book something like "Dark Incantations" or "Journal of Black Magic". You could even make up an author's name, such as Vladmir Eldritch or Vampyre Crypt.
6. Use a gold or silver pen to write the name of your book and author in the center of the front cover. Use a Gothic calligraphy style or just write it in a slightly jagged handwriting to make it appear more frightening.
7. Decorate the rest of your front cover by gluing on bats that you have cut out. Add cobwebs; these can be bought from a store or you can draw them on with a white pen. Add pictures of skeletons, broomsticks, shrunken heads--anything you like. You can buy these, cut them out of magazines or draw them yourself and cut them out.
Add the Spells
8. Look on the Internet for ideas of spells or make them up yourself. As an example it could be something like: "Binding Two People Together - Place the figure of a man at one end of the mantelpiece and a figure of the woman at the other end. Collect a piece of hair from each person. Attach the hair with a drop of candle-wax to their respective figures. Over the next seven days move each figure closer to each other, until on the final day they meet in the middle"
9. Leave one page blank at the beginning then write a spell on each page with a black pen or calligraphy pen. You can add drawings or diagrams on the pages to make it more interesting. Place a page number at the bottom of each spell page.
10. Go back to your blank beginning page and write a contents page with the respective page number, for instance; Binding Spell 01, Love Spell 02, Waking the Dead 03 and so on. Your scary spell book is now complete.
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