Hangable Halloween Decorations by Kids

Let me begin by saying I am not much of a designer–I mainly enjoy printing things. However this was a fun activity with my kids that resulted in some Halloween decorations to hang on the tree in our front yard. These are not perfect creatures. They are the result of telling someone to draw a bat (and later spider, ghost, web) exactly as you see it in your head without looking at another picture first. The artists here range from age 3 to 8, with maybe a few a bit older ;)

1. Have them draw a picture with a continuous black line on white paper–try to keep it clean otherwise (might be hard to do, but there is sort of a way to fix this later).
2. Go over their lines with a dark black Sharpie/pen if needed. If they have a filled-in area, make sure there are no lighter spots inside of it if possible.
3. Scan that image or take a photo of it. I generally just take a photo with my phone.
4. Use an online image converter site (or Adobe) to convert your image file (jpg in my case) into an SVG file.
5. You can open a blank plate in Bambu Studio and add the SVG to as an object–you will probably have to size it down quite a bit to fit on the plate. If you used pen and paper you will likely see an object with many parts. Only one of those is usually the part you want. Click through them to make sure, but you can get rid of anything you don’t want in the print.
6. If there are holes in the print when you slice it, the black lines or areas weren’t solid enough in your drawing. A quick way to fix this is to open in Paint and touch it up with a black pen. Or if you like shortcuts…
7. You can skip most of the tweaking here by just drawing your image in black on white in Paint or some other software. The background will be much cleaner as result and you will most likely get a single part/object. Younger kids won’t be able to do this very well though unless you have a pen/tablet available.
8. Let them have fun and draw silly things, then bring them to life as a print and watch them enjoy hanging them places around the house. Adults can have fun making them too! No matter what your drawing skill everyone gets something they made they can show off to others. (Even if everyone in my office made fun of me for the one I drew–I’ll never tell which one.)

I’ve included our examples and some hangers you can use to get started, but it really is the most fun if you try it yourself. I printed all of these in PETG, but may try some PLA ones as well. The hooks are probably more flexible in PETG than PLA.

I’ll include photos of some of the drawings we started with and the prints themselves.

Included are quite a few plates, but each one only takes a short time to print.