Halloween Witches and Creepiness

I've mostly been working on some figures, polymer clay and Paperclay, during my spare October time, but I haven't managed to finish even one of those. I did get inspired to finish a Halloween page in my "Teesha" journal, a really creepy digital collage and a digitally colored Sweetpea witch. So just a little while before the witching hour of Halloween, I'm going to share those.

 I didn't know any "witch" nursery rhymes for my "Teesha" journal but found several really cute ones online searching on "witch nursery rhymes". She's a little different than the rest of the pages in that I left her BJD eyes. Her dress is from Raphael Tuck's Antique Paper Dolls, a book I've had for ages; Dover, I think. The pumpkin stamp at the bottom is from Queen Kat.

I've been working on this one for quite a while. All I knew I wanted to use was the photo Pam took at the Ohio Reformatory in Mansfield. I did an image adjustment on it to make it blue, took most of the glass out of the windows and added the moonscape. The girl, an online find, was standing in water which I turned to blood. Skeletons are a must for creepiness - I think these are from Flickr Commons. The Bleeding Hearts, flowers and otherwise, came from my desire for a creep factor.

This sweet little witch is a Sweetpea image. I've bought a ton of their witches and used only a few so I was quite happy using this one for some Halloween cards.

Thanks for visiting! 

Loving Photoshop Tutorials

I learn a lot from online Photoshop tutorials. My favorite kinds are the ones that don't include video as I frequently need to recheck the steps which is so much easier in a textbook format.
Well, I bought my third or fourth copy of Somerset Digital Studio recently and instead of getting bent out of shape that all of the lovely layouts were made from digital kits, I decided to go look at some of the digital kits. Being a bit of a slow learner I have a hard time jumping on a new bandwagon. Well, the kits are amazing and lots of brilliant designers have created so many papers and elements and clipping masks (still have to find a tutorial for what those are) that it's tempting to spend my year's craft allowance on the kits. And I will buy some but I also recognize when clip art has been artfully manipulated and I wanted to learn how to do that.
I fiddled around for a day or two using my digital coloring skills and getting nowhere and then I decided to look up a tutorial for coloring old photos. I read several but here's the one I liked the best: {Sorry that was a very bad link} . And here's what I did with it:

It's slick as can be and the really cool part is that I can go back into the unflattened file and change any or all of the different colors I used for a different look. And the selections are already saved because I used layer masks to add the color.

Airless Chambers: October Newsletter Freebie Contest

There'a an October challenge going on over at Airless Chambers, the darker Rick St. Dennis blog. The challenge requires the use of Callista, who was given as a freebie in Rick's October newsletter. There's lots of eye candy currently on Airless Chambers as many of Rick's Design Team have posted their Callista projects. If you don't receive the newsletter be sure to sign up for future news. Callista is a still available for purchase in Rick's Etsy Shop here.

For my entry I created the haunted house background paper digitally and colored Callista digitally, all in PS CS5. She was great fun to play with!

Thanks for visiting!