Last month a friend of mine who resells vintage and antique items in a few places offered me these too-chipped chalkware plaques of little Dutch children carrying buckets on yokes.
I didn’t know of a home for them with me or someone I know so I declined, but then I couldn’t stop thinking about repainting them for Halloween! A couple weeks later she still had them, so I picked them up and went to town ruining 'em up! 
After washing and giving them a good going over with steel wool, I primed with with a paint/primer combo housepaint I had around. Then I just played around with craft paints and artists acrylics I had on hand.
I tried to turn the chips into holes in their cloths by adding green skin and red blood in the ones I could find after all the painting. I also added brownmud on their boots, hems, knees, hands, bucket bottoms and blood/gore all over!
Then the whole thing got smeared with black glaze. After that dried I added “interference red” acrylic with a dry brush on the grey background and pearlescent white in their eyes.
Of course, it wouldn’t be “realistic” for them to be hauling water or milk in those buckets so I made some lumpy, gory gunk from mixing a few colors of artist acrylic paint, acrylic medium, and plastic beads. Once that dried I added a touch of the red interference paint to it, too.
While I applied that mixture I glued in these tentacles that I made with glow-in-the-dark Fimo that I glued glass seed beads onto for suckers!
The backs were kind of dingy when I got them and since I didn’t mask them off, they were a little sloppy with paint, too. So I covered them with some vintage felt I picked up at the thrift store years ago and added a “signature” window thingies, too.
After the photo was taken I added picture wire and for now they’re hanging in the guest room until the end of October.
ADDENDUM: I forgot to mention that all the materials used to redo these kids came from stash. YEY!
