We needed a new center peice for our cemetery since our Grim Reaper bit the dust. The Grim Reaper was our first Monster Mud prop, so we learned a lot of "Do's" and "Don'ts" when he was built. The first lesson was to build a solid frame. So pictured below is our our wooden frame for the tree. We must note, though, we made two mistakes with this tree. First mistake. As you can see there are two circle cutouts in the frame (on the top and middle of this frame). We should have made a third one for the bottom. Turns out the chicken wire could not sustain the shape of the tree after the Monster Mud was applied and it started to cave in. Lesson learned, don't underestimate the weight of Monster Mud. The second lesson was due to the size of this tree, we should have made a more solid base (we used a tripod for the base). Again because of the weight, we had a hard time moving the tree without breaking bits and peices off of it. Now because the tree was so large, I wanted to make sure the limbs were removeable. So I pictured below is how I was able to rig the arms as an independant piece of the tree. This way I can pull them out when I am storing the tree. Once the frame was finished, we chicken wired the whole body. What is great about using the wood as a base is because then you can easily attach the chicken wire with a staple gun. Now we wanted a possessed tree, so we used one of our old medical skeletons for the form. We wired him to the chicken wire. The arms became part of the branches and his body was attached to the trunk. Now we are not sure what anyone else may use with the monster mud, but with a project this big, we used old bed sheets found at a thrift store. We wired the sheets to the frame first before applying the monster mud. Now for anyone that has not heard of monster mud, it is drywall compound mixed with latex paint. Ignore the current color, we just bought a messed up gallon of latex paint for 5.00 to mix with the drywall compound. If you need recipes, do a Google search for Monster Mud. Many people have recipes for this product. After the monster mud was dry, now began the painting process. And the finished product is below. As a side note, the vines on the tree is actually the cotton spider webbing dunked into the monster mud. I like how the vines turned out and may use that technique on future projects.