GIANT GINGERBREAD MAN - DIY Tutorial

Today we're going to be building giant gingerbread cookies that are going to look perfect in our Christmas decorations. Now each gingerbread man is a little over five and a half feet tall and it took only a few hours to build so join me for the ride. Today we're going to be making a gingerbread man. Now this is one of the easiest projects you can do for Christmas because we're only using a four foot by eight foot insulation foam board. Now this board is two inches thick, we're going to grab our marker, we're going to draw out the shape of the gingerbread man, we're going to get our jigsaw, we're going to cut it and then we're going to paint it. Once it dries we can put our icing and details on it. It's going to look amazing. This project should take no more than an hour for the initial setup and cut, some time for it to dry after you paint it and then another 30 minutes to finish the final details. Super easy so join me for the ride. For the outline that I'm going to draw I went to google images to find a generic looking gingerbread man. From there I'm going to kind of just copy what I'm seeing on my phone onto the board over here. Now I'm not an artist and I'm not good at drawing so it was difficult for me at first to do it but it's kind of a simple shape. You can't go wrong with the gingerbread shape so after a few tries on paper doing it I felt comfortable enough to draw it on the board and if you want to be a little bit more high-tech you could use a projector. They sell inexpensive ones on Amazon where it mirrors the image and then it shoots it onto whatever surface you have it on. I'll link it in the description below but you could put this standing up get this inexpensive projector that's meant for these type of images where you you can put an image underneath it and then it'll project it onto the wall so that you could outline it. That's something that you could do as well but I'm just going to freehand it and hopefully it doesn't look that odd but you never know what can happen here so let's get to it. Now that we've traced it let's get our jigsaw and cut this gingerbread man out. And this is what it looks like after it's been cut. Look how nice it looks. We're almost done. Now this one's almost five foot seven tall. I could have gone bigger but the proportions would have been a problem. If you use the entire eight foot board the arms would be too short and the legs might be too long. So at this height I thought it was a reasonable amount so that it would look proportional but I think it's looking amazing. Now we have to paint it. I'm going to let it dry overnight then tomorrow we're going to put the finishing details on it the trim the buttons the eyes and then we're done. Look how easy it's been to paint it. I'm using this paint that I have it's called Toasty Fireplace in Satin and this is from Lowe's. So this one is going to just roll on here with this foam roller I have and we're going to let it dry overnight. Remember get the sides get everywhere. Once it dries on the top I'm going to flip it over and paint the back. The front occasionally needs two coats the back only needs one coat but you could add multiple coats if you feel like it needs more but two coats in the front should be enough to give it that gingerbread look. Now that we're done painting it and it's dried we're ready to put the icing buttons and everything else on our gingerbread man. So I have my hot gun right there ready with our hot glue and we're going to start putting rope around this. Now the rope I picked for this is a candy cane inspired rope. It's going to be half an inch of rope so this is the rope we got. Isn't this awesome? It's a candy cane rope which is just regular rope that's just with red and white but I'm using half an inch. You can go with an inch but this rope gets expensive the thicker it gets so half an inch is good enough. We're going to go along the corners of the gingerbread man all around and we're going to be sticking it with hot glue so I'm going to link this in the bio below as well if you want to go with this. You can also go with white. My other gingerbread men are made with white rope on the side but I think this is going to look really nice with this candy cane looking I have here these clear acrylic fillable christmas balls. These are extra large. It comes apart like this. We're going to spray paint the inside of this white with white spray paint and these will be the eyes. Next we have this rope. We have white rope or the candy cane rope we just used that we can use as details for the legs, maybe details for the arms, or even the smile. We could use white rope or candy cane rope. I have these plastic fake candies over here. I'm actually going to be using this for the smile but these look like real candies. These are amazing. You could use them anywhere on the gingerbread but I'm going to use these for the smile. You could also use awesome donuts. These are from Hobby Lobby. They make all these awesome treats just like this star over here from Hobby Lobby. You could use these for the eyes. You could use these for the buttons. You could use it for anything. I'm going to be using fake candies and cookies from Hobby Lobby. I'm going to be using some gingerbread cookies as well for the buttons of our gingerbread man and of course I use Gorilla Glue hot glue to glue everything together. This is what I use for all my projects. I go through so many bags of these so let's get started but the point of all this is to say you can make it your own. Mix and match things. Get different types of you could use buttons. You could use real foam. You could use anything to make yours unique. This is how I'm going to do mine today but I just wanted to give you some ideas of things that are out there that you might want to try to use on your gingerbread man. Okay so for the eyes we're just going to put some satin bright white exterior spray paint. There we go. Okay we just don't want them to move around while we're spraying them and just like that. So we'll let them dry and those will be the eyes. These little tips right here we're going to use some wire cutters to just cut them off. There are wire cutters over here just like that and just like that we've made a smile out of these fake candies. So you can use less you can use more but I like it just like this. Make sure you put the eyes so it doesn't look odd. So I set up everything before I actually glue it and this looks good right there so I'm going to use my glue gun to glue each one of them down just like that. For his buttons I'm using these awesome fake cookies. These are from Hobby Lobby. They're Christmas tree ornaments and we're just going to place them just like that. Just like actually I'm going to do it like this and then we're going to glue it together. Cut off the tags and we're good to go. Once our Christmas balls are dry what I did is I cut a piece of pool noodle from here just so that I can glue it to the inside and then apply glue right over here so that it can have a good grab like that. So let's grab our goo goo let's grab our glue gun. Let's put some hot glue on the inside just like that and then glue right there. Bam! I think we put enough. We'll just turn it over like this. There we go and then we'll do the same for the next one. For the leg and arm details we're going to be cutting some of the rope that we used just like over here and we'll put it right there and then just do a little shape like that. Just like that we'll cut it then we'll apply a hot glue on the bottom and we'll be done with the legs. We'll do the same thing to the arms. So the last step we're going to be doing is attaching this piece of PVC pipe to the back of the gingerbread man. Now you can attach it right here or you can attach it right here it doesn't matter. All we're doing is putting spray foam underneath it on the sides of this so that once it dries we can put a piece of rebar into the ground at an angle and then put our gingerbread over that piece so it can stay upright throughout the holiday season. So once we're finished putting the expanding foam you need to paint it. Paint it the same color as the gingerbread man. Last year I used copper pipe holders. I used two of them and just a piece of rebar and it fell over. This way with the expanding foam and the PVC pipe it'll be very sturdy in windy or rainy conditions. Now I'm using three quarter inch pipe but you can use half an inch as well as long as it fits over your rebar. So let's get this going so we can finish our project.