Happy Halloween!

I hope everyone has a fun and safe time trick or treating and partying tonight!

Here are the last of my Halloween creations this year, a couple of cards I sent to family, using Making Memories and Teresa Collins by Junkitz papers with some Quickutz, Jolees and recycled calendar diecuts:

and

Happy Hauntings, everyone! Don't forget to set back your clocks an hour to Fall Back off Daylight Savings Time if you live where that is done. Oh, to be a witch like Samantha and be able to just wrinkle up that pretty nose and do that in one fell swoop, eh? I have too many clocks! winkwink

Halloween Haunt Down: Day 2 of 3

Here are a couple of atc's I've made this Halloween season. I used rub-ons from my Marah Johnson Skull and X-bones collection, a background paper and flowers from a RAK, an Elsie label, jewel brads and a little stamped heat embossing. The red one has several layers of Diamond Glaze as a top coat and gives it its glossy grunge look :

and

Join me tomorrow for Day 3 of the Halloween HauntDown...

Halloween Haunt Down: Day 1 of 3

Geez, I'd better get started with showing you what all I've made for Halloween, since we only have 3 days to go. And if you live in Australia, the big day is tomorrow! (I can never wrap my head around that 14 hour time difference, can you? I mean, does that mean they always know stuff before we do, or does it mean they are always the last to know stuff that happens? See, just another way in which not having a good spatially developed brain hurts me...oh, the inhumanity!)

A couple of 4x6 artist postcards for ya:

and

Wow, that was scary, huh? {snort} Here's a little mild autumness to calm ya down:

Come back tomorrow for Day 2 of the Countdown...

It's BOO Month!

It never fails. When I have a calendar collage ready to show on the first of the month, I forget! So it is here, but I'm grateful I remembered on October 2nd. This month, I practice my colored wax pencil layering. All the orange bordering you see is really a few different colors and about 6 layers.

Did you know that when you color with pencils, you should lay down multiples so lightly and thin that you can barely see the first one? (I'm talking the regular pencils, not watercolor, although I'm guessing it wouldn't hurt to layer those either.) If you use good waxy ones like Prismacolors, the wax will move the color around the paper, and on each subsequent layer the wax will help the color to fill in where it skipped on the prior layer. I learned this back in the stone age when I was taking art classes as a college undergraduate. My instructor would say, "A light hand lets the wax work."

It's true. Most people apply too much pressure on the first layer and/or give up way too soon when coloring. The first layer of color should be hard to see, in fact. Although this is tres difficult for me to do as well, I've had my best luck doing it by pretending to be testing the color to see if I like it and that helps me apply it lightly. Something else I do is to wipe each layer with a tissue occasionally in between layers. Some people do not do that. They like to keep the bits of color dust on the surface. It all depends on personal preference.

Anyway, we shade and color our dolls with Prismacolors in Suziblu's class, so that means this is another technique I need to do decently. Practice makes perfect, ya know! LOL

My collage for this month's calendar page was simply done, as the Karen Foster paper is very busy on its own. The skull is a rub-on from Marah Johnson's Skull & X-bone Designs booklet, and the pumpkins and witch are from my stash. I made the calendar grid masthead with a strip of scrapbook paper (Theresa Collins for Junkitz) and various stash alphabet stickers which I then outlined with black gel pen. I added a digital frame around the photo in my PSP Pro Photo X2 software.

Back to making greeting cards! Happy World Card-Making Day, by the way. Today is also the start of my second workshop class over at A.R.T. (a study of techniques in Lynne Perella's awesome book, Artists Journals & Sketchbooks (we use the acronym AJS). I will be having a crafty weekend and hope you will, too.