13 Days of Creepmas With Rick St. Dennis - Day 7

This is the exact midpoint of the hop.That's a smidgen off - Pauline is the seventh blogger on the 7th day so you just passed halfway. I'm a little OC about time, I guess. Today I'm channeling Martha Stewart at a Creepmas Blog Hop, i.e., I have a recipe for you. My post is Christmas Snacks. Well, I'll let you judge for yourself how appetizing these snacks are.

In addition to  Creepmas Snacks, I've used Skating Santa 's head for the extremely overjoyed HOHOHO Santa. I did ask permission before I beheaded him! The cookie recipe is one of my favorites. If you are determined to add the ornament shards, please use green ornaments. Red dye #7 is so dangerous for children!! The recipe will print at 4 x 6 if you download the one you get when you click on it.

And these are the yummy cookies. I did forego the shards in mine! To each his own!!

I hope you've enjoyed my little touch of Martha! Thanks for visiting and thanks for the kind comments you leave. I enjoy your feedback!! Now off with you to the rest of the Hop. And don't forget there's some Creepmas going on over at Smeared and Smudged too.

13 Days of Creepmas With Rick St. Dennis - Day 6

Are we seeing some really awesome creepy Art? I think so! The flip side of retailers showing Christmas merchandise so early that it gets in the way of enjoying the fall holidays hit home for me yesterday. I got out to get a few supplies and it was one of the first times I'd gotten to look at the Christmas stuff at JoAnns (we have that and a Hobby Lobby about half an hour from the funny farm) and stuff was marked 40 - 60% off and they were out of lots of things I might have considered! Way to save money, I guess - stay busy!
My piece for today is one that was completely fun. Except for the martini, the red curls and maybe a couple of extra pounds it's me - I got Decoratin' to Do.

And now I actually have martini glasses from Goodwill @ $.50 each  and that darling metal frame for $.90. I was ecstatic to find such bargains just when I needed them! The digital stamp was colored in Photoshop; the striped background is a piece of fabric. I read a tutorial on making candy canes and I can assure you it won't be the last of them you'll see from me!! Another totally fun thing to do! I really love this piece and hope you do too!
Now hop, hop, hop along and enjoy the rest of today's creations! And since you've made it this far, I can rest assured you probably won't get lost today!

13 Days of Creepmas With Rick St. Dennis - Day 5

Here we are at Day 5 of the 13 Days of Creepmas with Rick St. Dennis and December is flying by! It seems a great day to tell you all how much I appreciate the kind comments you've been leaving for me and the rest of the design team. It makes the effort we put into each project seem worthwhile!!

I have a really short post today - these were supposed to be ATCs but I kept them about the size of a regular card.

The images from Rick's Etsy shop are Mistletoe and Carniverous Bonnet . I thought they made a very cute Creepmas couple. The green background paper is from K & Company - one of their Christmas stacks. The side and top border stamps are from Heidi Grace and the middle one is from Stampers Anonymous. Everything else was done in Photoshop.
Enjoy the rest of the Hop today and don't get lost!

13 Days of Creepmas with Rick St. Dennis - Day 4

There is a subculture of Alice fans who love Dark Alice. I had been vaguely aware of it when my son was playing a video game called American McGee's Alice. It had very beautiful graphics and lots of blood. I encountered Dark Alice again in the world of ball-jointed dolls when artist Kim Lasher had a huge hit with her Dark Alice doll. Then last year American McGee released a new video game "Alice - The Madness Returns". I play lots of video games but do not have the quickness required for that kind of game. However, a book was published with much of the concept art and I had to have that.

As it happened, I was looking through that book shortly before I saw Rick's "Creepmas Dolls" digital image and it just clicked for me. The dolls in the latest game are in a dollhouse for insane dolls. Okay, here's my take:

The top image is the original Photoshop file. The window and siding are my photos. I wanted the name of an asylum, preferably of the Victorian era and English. Imagine my glee to find that one of them was called Bedlam.                   

This card I made with a print of the original is interesting in how blue it turned out. I guess that could have been the camera. I created the papers in Photoshop.

I did another take with the original image using a bombed out hotel in Lebanon but hadn't noted the photographer so I took this shot of a school in Seattle and it worked out fine. The lights are a clear stamp from Heidi Grace.

I hope you are enjoying seeing all of the Creepmas creations here on Rick's blog hop. Now I'll let you be on your way to see some more!! Don't get lost!

13 Days of Creepmas with Rick St. Dennis - Day 3

Are we having fun getting all creeped out for Creepmas? GOOD!!

Today's post is something I had up on Rick's Facebook group I think several weeks ago. I reworked it - lightening it up a bit and getting rid of the ugly gray wall. I also removed the horrid embossing from the holly. If you saw it then, I hope you like it better now!

And if you work in Photoshop, let this be a lesson to you - always keep your layered files. Those changes were relatively easy to make. On a coming post I'll explain what happens if the layers accidentally get smushed. (That's an official Photoshop term.)

The digital stamp is Evil Jack and he was loads of fun to color in traditional Christmas reds and greens. One of the coolest things about Photoshop or other photo editing programs is that when you choose a bright color like red, the color-picker opens a square for you that has all of the reds related to the bright one from the palest pink to the darkest burgundy and none of the colors in that square has a whit more yellow or blue in it than your chosen bright color. That allows you (or me) to pick reds that are not all just the same but coordinate beautifully. There are tons of things I love about working in Photoshop but that has to be one of my favorites, especially when I'm working with images as complex as many of Rick's are.

The stamped holly is from All Night Media, the floor and the sleeper feet are from online sales sites. When we started this hop, I thought it would be disconcerting to see several people using the same image on the same day, but yesterday Miranda, Helen and I used the Euro Carolers and it was an eye-opening jolt to see how each of us had a completely different vision of it. So look around the hop - you're sure to be inspired with your own vision of some of Rick's fabulous digital stamps!! And go find that new rollout for today!!!

13 Days of Creepmas with Rick St. Dennis - Day 2

Well, Day 1 was certainly fun - seeing what all of us came up with! I loved seeing how others on the Design Team used some of the same images that I have waiting in the wings. Doing only the RSD hop, I really didn't find it all that confusing which blogroll to use to stay on this hop. I made it most of the way through the Smeared and Smudged hop as well and will try to finish what I missed tomorrow. The Official Creepmas Hop confused me as most of the blogs I visited did not have a blogroll posted and I kept having to go back to the main page and forgetting where I had been - sort of like when I try to do counted cross-stitch.
Now, after that in depth analysis, let's get to my Day 2 project:

The first shot was my original idea and I had hoped to include Vanessa as well as Vlad drooling over the carolers but the design got a little crowded so I decided she would be just arising from her coffin in the background. This was so much fun to bring my vision to life with Rick's fabulous digital stamps! The book that the house came from is Victorian Houses - A Treasury or 100 Original Designs by David Spelling.

The Euro Carolers were the most time-consuming to color and I wanted to feature them in this little Creepmas box. I printed them in layers on ink-jet printable shrink plastic (which shrinks quite a bit more than they claim as these guys were supposed to go nearly all the way across.) There are four layers - the cat is the top one. I hope that's somewhat perceivable! One of my worst nightmares about Christmas as a child was that Santa would really know how bad I'd been and there would be sticks for presents - thus the "creepy" sticks in the box.

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I hope you are all enjoying seeing Rick's digital stamps colored up and in projects and getting lots of ideas of your own on how to use them. Have fun on the rest of the hop and don't get lost!

Rick St. Dennis 13 Days of Creepmas Day 1

Here we are at December 1 and ready to start 13 Days of Creepmas with Rick St. Dennis. In addition to most of the design team most days, Rick is participating every day so it will be fun to see what he comes up with. If you've made it here following the blogroll, which on this site is in the sidebar on the right, you probably know that there are a lot of new digital designs rolling out - one for every day of the hop and each one is up for grabs. All you need to do is find it on one of our blogs and leave a comment to that effect and then leave a comment on Rick's Airless Chambers blog and tell him what you found and where. The first person to do that wins the image of the day.
And the person who wins the most images by being first on different days will actually get all of the images. Cool right??

My project for today is The Frostinator . I chose him because he's a little Steamy, which is a neat trick considering that he's a snowman (or almost half a snowman). With all of his gears and such showing, he was great fun to color. The first time I looked at his companion, I thought it was a cardinal so decided it was a chameleon with a bad case of cardinal envy. To complement his Steampunk side, I built the interior snowflakes out of gears and a little math. You all know how I like my math! The Steampunk bird is from Queen Kat Designs, the snowscene is my pond and my footprints and there are two sets of snowflake brushes, one is snowflake_brushes_by_hawksmont and the other is snowflakes-keepwaitingdirt. Ice Nine to me is an element of Kurt Vonnegut's Cats' Cradle but I guess there are other references of which I am clueless!

So, get on your way and see the goodies that everyone else has created. There are several Creepmas hops starting today - there's one going on at Smeared and Smudged that goes every other day for 12 days and there's one at The Official Creepmas Blog. Several of Rick's designers are participating in all three so stay alert, have fun and don't get lost!