The half-buried look: setting a groundbreaker in twenty minutes

It is a silhouette, not a sculpture

From the street nobody sees the paint job. They see a shape coming out of the ground where a shape should not be. So the whole job is making the shape read: put it where the lawn is flat and open, angle it toward the direction traffic comes from, and keep at least six feet of clear grass around it. A groundbreaker crowded against a bush, a mailbox or a tombstone disappears into the clutter.

Twenty minutes, in order

• Pick the spot at dusk, not at noon. Stand at the curb and look at the lawn the way a passing car will.
• Dig a shallow trench for the base plate, an inch or two, so the plate sits below grade. A plate sitting on top of the grass is the number one giveaway.
• Stake the plate. Groundbreakers are low and heavy in the base, so two stakes usually do it; three if the figure has raised arms.
• Cover the plate and the seam with mulch, dead leaves or a torn strip of creepy cloth. Rake it messy. Neat mulch looks like landscaping.
• Tilt the figure a few degrees toward the street. Dead vertical reads as a garden statue; a slight lean reads as motion.
• Light it from the ground, in front and slightly to one side, a single spot or flame light two to three feet away. Light from above flattens it.

Pairing

One groundbreaker is a joke. Two, spaced eight to ten feet apart, is a plot. Put a headstone behind each one, offset so the stone is not directly behind the figure, and the eye connects them into a graveyard without a single extra prop. If you have an archway or a fence section, it goes at the front edge, and the groundbreakers go behind it, not in front, so the fence frames them.

What to skip

Skip the fog on a groundbreaker unless it is chilled fog that stays down. Warm fog rises and hides exactly the part you buried it to show. Skip the strobe; it makes the figure flicker in and out and the brain stops reading it as a shape. And skip putting it on a slope facing away from the street. You paid for the front of it.

Do groundbreakers survive rain?

The resin and the foam ones do. Fabric-dressed figures want a covered spot or a quick wring-out after a storm. Bring anything with a motor or a sound module inside if the forecast says more than a drizzle.

How close to the sidewalk can I put one?

Far enough that a kid cannot trip on the base or the stakes. Three feet back from the walk, minimum, and no guy lines across a path.