Scarecrow Halloween Costume

What are you afraid of?

My son knew exactly what he wanted to be for Halloween 2021: a scarecrow. Specifically, the Scarecrow villain from Batman. Even more specifically: Scarecrow from the video game Batman Arkham Knight.

With less than a month to get the costume together it was an all-hands-on-deck family project. We combined several disciplines and utilized a mixture of store-bought, custom made, and repurposed materials to get it all together.

Printing, Painting, Sewing, and Circuits

The key aspects of the costume we wanted to capture were: scarecrow's fear toxin injector glove, his filter mask, and his glowing fear toxin canisters. We focused most of our effort on those items. In addition, we customized some brown clothing (gloves, hoodie, and pants) with jute fiber for a scarecrow look. This makes the costume a bit of a combination of the traditional Arkham Asylum design along with the more tactical gear style of the Arkham Knight version.

I started by designing and 3D printing an arm gauntlet and a glove attachment for the injectors. I included several items from this set of greeblies on Thingiverse to add some surface detail quickly. I then airbrushed them in a metallic silver with a dark undercoat and added some detail.

We used orange acrylic paint for the toxin and coated the inside of some silicone tubing, plastic injectors, and some squeezy food containers. It turned out to be nearly impossible to get the paint to stick to the inside of the containers. Great for food safety, bad for arts and crafts. I printed a custom clip to attach the bottles to a belt.

I also wired up some LEDs and stuck them in the bottles for a nice glow effect.

Next, I modified the filters from this scarecrow mask on Thingiverse so that they could be attached to a generic latex scarecrow mask. This step saved us a lot of time. Crafting a shaped burlap mask from scratch would have pushed us way out of our costume design comfort zone.

We cut apart some old clothes and sewed the back together with jute rope for a scarecrow-y look without a lot of fuss. It was fun taking them outside and rubbing them with dirt and rocks to give them a distressed look.

Results

The costume came together really well and turned out to be a super fun family project. This started a tradition of somewhat over-the-top costume builds for halloween.