Charlie Brown Christmas

The result

First, I picked the characters and poses I wanted to use from the Christmas special and copied those frames into Photoshop. I found some websites that compared the heights of the different characters so I scaled them and positioned them to fit a 4×8 sheet of plywood. I had to erase a lot and clean up a lot of lines in Photoshop before being ready to draw them actual size.

I projected the layouts onto the plywood and traced them all. I used a jigsaw to cut out each character. This was the first time I used this saw but I picked it up pretty fast and liked it. I painted all of the characters with a white primer base coat to help waterproof them and give me a good color base to draw and paint the details on. Then I created a list of colors I needed and went to the paint store and bought quart samples of each color. This was a perfect amount–more than enough paint and not very expensive.

To hold the characters up, I decided to use fence posts. I’ve used them for other projects and they seemed pretty sturdy. We cut them to the lengths we needed, pounded them into the ground and screwed them to the wood from the back using stainless steel screws.