Making an Entrance (Part 2)—Winged Boars

The entrance gates to Hogwarts are topped by winged boars. We wanted to also have the entrance gates to our Hogwarts to have those, but how to do it?

We had several thoughts about how to accomplish this—everything from sourcing giant piggy banks to buying pig piñatas. After those attempts did not yield results, we opted to make them. Here are the steps we went through.

First, at one of our Community Painting Days, Mary-Anne and Bich took some Styrofoam and newspaper and shaped the understructure of the boars.

Next, we re-purposed the wings from our Flying Monkeys of last year, and attached them to plastic stands which we got from a ‘going-out-of-business’ sale at a local store.

Then, we installed those stands into the foam structure and added more newspaper and masking tape to finish shaping the boar.

While we initially thought of covering the newspaper undersculpture with papier mâché, but remembered that we had a lot of left over yellow duct tape from last year (which we used to create the yellow brick road), and decided to use that to create the ‘outer skin.’