31 Days of Halloween - Day 9

Sorry for the extremely sloppy post this morning. I needed to finish and photograph this tagbook and I think my name this morning must be Queen Sadim (Midas backwards) because everything I touched turned to s***.

The mess at the top of the tagbook will become a spider and it will get a name, but for now let me give as many credits as I can before my time runs out.

Lots of the images are Inkadinkado - cat on ghost page, pumpkin with bats, sketch kitty, fancy moon, birds with fence. Rats are from Artful Illusions, fence, little bird, tombstones from Martha Stewart, ghosts and monster from 100 Proof Press, cover scenery from Stampscapes, haunted house from Crackerbox Palace, witch from Third Coast. If I've missed any you want to know about, let me know.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 8

Flowers, y'all!! I said I would do it!

Today's offering is a digital collage I've been working on for months, off and on, but it had been shuffled to the back burner. I started another project yesterday that I was loving but couldn't seem to finish. So I hauled this out, added the ghost stamp from Third Coast so it could qualify to be here and put a little story to it (and the flowers, of course).

Except for the girls and the ghost and the little snippet of lace, all of the layers of the collage were photos I have taken. The foggy morning background is our back field, house taken on a walking tour of Paducah, KY, flowers and spider web from a previous garden. I consider the spider web to be the most awesome layer as it took some real fiddling around to isolate it.

Lots of wonderful posts yesterday and hopefully everybody will get rested up over the weekend although for those of you with children and/or jobs, there may be more to do on weekends than other days. Being retired, the days are all pretty much the same - only the work changes. Today we're cutting wood and splitting it for the woodburner in my studio.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 7

I am having so much fun. There are some vulgar ways to say how much fun I'm having, but let's just say so much fun. But after a few sunny days, I had to get some garden work done and when it was time to get back here, I realized my brain and body were pretty much fried. AND that I've never worked on art stuff for 31 days in a row before.

So today I'm posting one of the projects that I did in anticipation of actually starting. I'm one of those who need lots of time and no pressure so I took the suggestion to start early very seriously and have lots of projects almost ready.

These little monsters are Zettiology, the squiggles are Magenta and I don't know whose alphabet. As I had stamped onto the blue cardstock, coloring options were limited and I decided to try chalk. It's not precise but I liked it.

Thanks for all your support and comments. I feel very welcome here!!

31 Days of Halloween - Day 6

Methinks Murdoch Mummy is in for a big surprise as Cat'chula likes his mummy newly risen and very dry.

Do your projects come to mind all fully formed or do you work from a germ of an idea? My normal way of working is the latter, but when I received the "Here Kitty Kitty" stamp from Third Coast, this project just popped into my head. It changed a bit as I put it to paper - I had planned on using silverware in it and thought I might indulge myself with a new kitty stamp but when I found this maniacal cat in my stash a whole new twist happened.

Fence top from Artful Impressions, mummy from I Love Rubber Stamps, eyes and webs from those little cheapie sets, part of the tree from ProvoCraft. I had to elongate and add an extra branch to the tree and draw some of the weeds. Oh, the blood sploches were from Martha Stewart and the alphabet is Zetti.

All of the projects from yesterday were marvelous. I had no idea when I started this that I would be pushed to try such new and different things. That's because I barely had time to take a look around the forum before I jumped in headfirst to the "Days". Okay, I admit it, I waded in whining like a baby!

Comment form

I typed this up a bit ago to help me get through the commenting part of the challenge. Added the blog names because I am frequently lost. Please forgive me if I spelled anyone's name or blog wrong - I'm the person who spelled 3 wrong one of the days.

Feel free to download it and print it out if if would be helpful to you.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 5

WOW! Didn't think I'd make it on time this morning. I'd gotten so excited about all of the 3D art I'd been seeing and this little book had been sitting around for a while with a really crappy cover that had actually started to peel off. So I ripped the guts out of it (little bit of Smeared and Smudged humor there) and remade the cover with black fabric and sculpted the polymer clay crow and added some jewelry findings. Embellishments are not what I'm comfortable with but it's a start!

The pages are painted, stamped Lutradur with the image also stamped on similar colored paper and the whole sandwich put into slide mounts. Slide mounts were painted with some translucent paint?? and then stamped with border stamps.

Crows are from AlexStamping,Stamp Francisco, 100 Proof Press, Silver Crow, Artful Illusions, Martha Stewart and Inkadinkado. The whole thing measures 3 3/4 by 3 3/4 inches. Oh, and I'm supposed to say the spider web in the corner is from halloweenclipart.com.

Hurry, hurry. hurry and press publish!

31 Days of Halloween - Day 4

The 3rd day posts were amazing - lots of exciting 3D stuff!! I hope to tackle a 3D project at some point but staying flat today.

I had made the background paper in Photoshop before the "Days" started and then wondered why I had spent so much time on it since anything I mounted on it would cover the pumpkins, and skulls and bats. But the mind-blowing experience of joining the Smeared and Smudged forum and finding all of the smaller stamp companies and digital stamps (all of which I had never imagined) lead to the purchase of quite a lot of witches, some haunted houses and this lovely digi "Ghost Willow" from Tickled Pink.

I painted her just a bit and then reduced her opacity until the paper showed through and she was just a shadow of herself. If I print it and use it for a card, I will reduce the size but I worked it on regular paper size.