I
adore Halloween. Everything about it makes me happy--the change of season (although much more subtle here in Florida), the flavors of pumpkin spice everywhere, the kooky decorations in neighborhood yards, movies like
Sleepy Hollow,
The Nightmare Before Christmans,
Hocus Pocus....sigh. I just love it.
Clearly, I'm not the only artist enchanted with the holiday. Did you know there are artists who soley create Halloween-themed sculptures/dolls/paintings, etc? There are even art shows and conventions dedicated to them! Here are a couple that I've stumbled across:
http://www.ghoultidegathering.com, and
http://www.halloweenandvine.com. Click on the links for exhibitors to visit websites of individual artists. This link,
http://ehagemporium.blogspot.com, will take you to a blog run by a collective of Halloween artists. Just browsing through their whimsical creations always puts me in the spirit.
Here are a few pages and pics from a journal I've been working in off and on for a couple of years now. All of the pages are bit dark and mysterious with imagery borrowed from ancient alchemy and the tarot. I hope they put the Halloween spirit in you! Happy hauntings.....
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| Cover image. This started as a black and white copy on regular printer paper. I stained it with a little liquid acrylic and then sanded over it with my sanding block. |
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| It once was a red cloth covered book, but a painted over it with black acrylic paint and then used baby wipes and the sanding block to allow a bit of that "bloody" red to peek through. |
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| Inside front cover. Black acrylic, stamped pattern using white staz-on ink. Again, baby wipes to remove some color. |
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| Medieval illustration. I used that same technique as on the front cover image. Added black around the edges and corner of the pages, too. |
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| The three pages above are all just backgrounds waiting for future layers to be added. They were made by laying down masking tape, painting over it with black acrylics, and using those baby wipes again. Thank goodness I have a small child in diapers still, huh? This last page also has hand-drawn designs made with gel pens and metallic markers. |
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| Never did get back to finishing this guy's pages. I've nicknamed him "The Old Guard" for now. |
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| The book itself began life as a lovely little children's book about ballet. Not so lovely when you start gluing in hideous images like this guy, huh? I think there's an interesting story just waiting to be told in this page. Don't you think? Some variation on Beauty and the Beast, perhaps? |
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| This page has been aged with Walnut Ink spray. I'm really please with the patterns that emerged as the ink settled and dried. |
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| More alchemical imagery using techniques described above. |
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| The first pages I created inside the book. Moon pages. |
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