Halloween Collage Panel - Country View Crafts Design Team

Having had a playtime creating some potential halloween backgrounds (see post) I've taken the red one to use but before I created the collage I splattered some Barn Door Distress Spritz over it to give it some highlights.

This is my second inspiration project for October's Country View Challenges theme on FaceBook.

The Wicked Undertaker 

It is Victorian England and one of the creepiest crime waves in the East of London is surging. Anatomists and surgeons are needing an ever-increasing amount of bodies to advance their research in the study of human anatomy, and, as a result, they turn a blind eye to the dead body trade that is booming. Individuals and gangs are turning to body snatching (digging up graves to extract bodies) and selling them to make a neat profit— these are the scary body snatchers known as the London Burkers (burking meaning ‘killing someone for their marketable cadaver’). A gang led by John Bishop and Thomas Williams, who began their crimes by robbing fresh graves, quickly graduate to murder for an even fresher corpse to sell to the unscrupulous anatomists who are working with such criminals very regularly. Frightening!

Here is one of the unethical undertakers, Bertie Burns who engages in some of the underhand activities. At times bodies are very hard to come by, and sometimes, because desperate times call for desperate measures, the trade in human bodies also includes body parts, and often those who need bodies settle for body parts instead and Mr Burns makes a pretty penny.

xx

Materials

Dies Sizzix - Specimen,

Stampers Anonymous - Apothecary CMS138,  

Distress Inks - Seedless Preserves, Ripe Persimmon, Picked Raspberry, Mustard Seed, Vintage Photo, Ground Espresso, Scorched Timber

Distress Spritz - Barn Door, Fossilized Amber

Idea-ology  Corked Vials, Snippets Curator, Film Strip Ribbon, Muse Token - Halloween, Found Framed Portraits - Halloween, Remnant Rubs - Curiosities, Mummy Cloth, corked glass vials

Halloween Twilight Panel - Country View Crafts Design Team

Twilight 

Imagine it's dusk, there's a clear starlit sky and the moon is bright and golden and shining down across the wooded landscape. Slowly the nocturnal creatures are emerging into the shadows and a gentle breeze is beginning to rise. The leaves are rustling and whispering together softly whilst beautiful spidery sculptures of silvery threads entwine between them often glistening as they catch the light of the full moon. Bats are seen swooping and flying between the trees looking for their food and are beginning to gather together before migrating or hibernating. A large black bird with shimmering plumage alights on a branch of the gnarled tree amd cautiously surveys the area around him.  

It is October 31st, it is twilight and so a Halloween night of chills and tension begins.

Process Steps

I had such fun putting this panel together I thought I would frame it to go on the sideboard at Halloween. When I'd finished I also took some close detail photos. I love how 3D it looks now.

xxx

Supplies

Distress Inks - Scattered Straw, Bundled Sage, Evergreen Bough, Cracked Pistachio, Forest Moss, Pine Needles, Salty Ocean, Scorched Timber, Walnut Stain, Scattered Straw

Distress Spritz - Weathered Wood, Peacock Feathers

Distress Sprays - Black Soot, Mica Spray Brushed Pewter

Distress Watercolor Pencils - Scorched Timber, Iced Spruce

Distress Crayon - Peeled Paint

Distress Paint - Rusty Hinge

Distress Embossing Glaze - Hickory Smoke

Ranger Embossing Powder - Black

Distress Crayons - Fossilized Amber, Peacock Feathers, Peeled Paint

Sizzix Dies - Vault Lovebirds, Funky Wreaths, Festive Gatherings, Mixed Media Halloween

Idea-ology -  Muse Tokens - Halloween, Metal Quote Band Ephera Snippets - Curator, Remnant Rubs - Curiosities, Mini Pumpkins, Boneyard

Stampers Anonymous - Halloween CMS093, Halloween 2 CMS 113

Treasure Gold - Aquamarine, Treasure Silver

Rust inspired D'Oxides

 I love playing with inks and colours to produce different layers of for distressed backgrounds. As it's Halloween month I thought I would try out rust effects with distress oxides to see what happened. I love the result.

On A4 card. Used scorched timber, walnut stain, vintage photo, hickory smoke D'oxides, splattered and dipped into walnut stain Spritz then mixed left over spritz to vintage photo DO and water and dipped into it. Did another puddle of vintage photo and water and dipped into it some more. Finally spritzed water droplets and dried.

Cut card into 3 pieces.....

.... and got a gorgeous layered dipped, drippy, distressed effect.

I make very few projects for Halloween usually and I've already got my Country View Challenge ones made and scheduled so I think I'll chop these three pieces in half again and aim to create 6 small 10.4 x 9.7 cm panels.

xxx

Halloween Backgrounds - Distress inks and sprays

 Been playing with a variety of colours to make some distress backgrounds for potential Halloween backgrounds. I like most of them lol.

Happy Halloween

I have a post over on the Tando blog today sharing photos of a recent workshop I taught at Country View Crafts of a Halloween Triptych I originally made last year for the DecoArt Mixed Media blog.

If you would like to see how a fabulous group interpreted my boards please pop over here to the Tando Creative blog to see the results.

I hope today is full of treats and no tricks.

hugs Brenda xxx

Backward, turn backward,

Time, in your flight

make me a child again

just for to-night!

Elizabeth Akers Allen

Halloween panel and giveaway winner

Well this just seems to have been the busiest year ever and I don't physically have to go out to work anymore!!!!! But of course all the commitments I have for teaching and projects for manufacturers, magazines, shops and design teams really is a job in itself now and keeps me on my toes.

Talking of being busy we had a new baby grandson born to my daughter and her partner at the end of July, went away on holiday in August with my son and family, came home to a period of catch up for DT projects, taught at the fabulous 'In House Crafts' shop in Pembrokeshire towards the end of September and within 36 hours of getting home we were off again for nearly 3 weeks in California and literally 36 hours after our return last week I was teaching for Susan at Country View Crafts. I am so lucky and feel truly blessed to be able to do all of these things and have a wonderful hubby and family around me as well as lots of amazing friends and crafting buddies.

Anyway - I managed to squeeze a few supplies into my case coming home from the USA and of course added to them on my visit to Susan so I have been itching to get back to the work desk. I decided to delve into a little bit of Halloween fun and used one of the new Halloween Worn Wallpaper pieces from Tim Holtz and the packaging it came in to create a spooky panel.

I cut the packaging down to size and added some black distress paint and vintage photo distress oxide round the edging to continue what had already been printed on it.

Taking the worn wallpaper I altered it also with walnut stain and vintage photo oxides around the edges, blending, spritzing with water and dipping them into the watery colours on my mat. I then took carved pumpkin and spiced marmalade oxides and splattered using weatery mixes and also added some white acrylic ink to them to splatter with as well.

Next I gathered some collage layers, die-cuts and a framed portrait to start building my design.

When I got home last week so many of my flowers were still in bloom but starting to fade with the onset of autumn so I gathered some of them and some beautifully turned leaves and dried them in the microwave.

These salvias had been dried and sprayed with DecoArt matte acrylic spray but they were still very fragile. I ended up using DecoArt's decou-page glue to add them to the finished piece then painted some over the top of the flowers, covering it with wax paper and popping it under a heavy box for a few hours. This made them more durable.

Next- huge apologies for the lateness in choosing a winner for my giveaway which should have been chosen quite a few weeks ago - but all those life things above got in the way. I have now entered 15 comments into Random Org to generate a winner and we have  -

Congratulations to #13 who is Kate Yetter.

Kate wins the fossil stamps by Andy Skinner.

Woo hoo Kate, if you could send me your snail mail address I'll get them in the post to you. My email is on my side bar.

Thank you to everyone who entered I really appreciate your time in visiting my blog and leaving a comment.

That's my little bit of catch up and spooky art for today.

xxx

Halloween for Tando Creative

HI All

We are getting closer to All Hallows' Eve or All Saints' Eve which is a celebration observed in a number of countries on 31 October and is the eve of the Western Christian feast of All Hallows' Day. It begins the three-day observance of Allhallowtide, the time in the liturgical year dedicated to remembering the dead, including saints (hallows), martyrs, and all the faithful departed.

Of course activities include trick-or-treating, attending Halloween costume parties, carving pumpkins into jack-o'-lanterns, lighting bonfires, apple bobbing, divination games, playing pranks, visiting haunted attractions, telling scary stories and watching horror films. In many parts of the world, the Christian religious observances of All Hallows' Eve, including attending church services and lighting candles on the graves of the dead, remain popular, although elsewhere it is a more commercial and secular celebration. But whatever you believe and observe,

HAPPY HALLOWEEN.

For my Tando DT sample today I am using a medium media board that I cut myself and have added a stand for it.

I love using Pinterest and found a great colour combination -

and collected together media paints that I thought would give me the range of colours I wanted.

I took the purple and black and mixed them on the card whilst painting it at the same time.

I then stamped the spider's webs with grey and interference gold mixed together and then brushed over a watery mix of burnt umber and grey together and dried it whilst dabbing with some kitchen roll to get that misty, eerie look. I also splattered a little with watery grey on its own.

I painted the frame with violet, purple, black and grey paints again mixing them on the substrate to give lots of colour variations through it.

I gave it a coat of clear crackle glaze and rubbed in white antiquing cream when it was dry.

I gathered a few Tando chipboard pieces and a metal skull to start the design.

The spider has a speckled body as I gave it a coat of texture sand paste, painted all over with black and then rubbed some of the purple and silver paint over the high spots and the tops of the legs and repeated with interference gold.

The bat was painted with black and burnt umber mixed and I stippled a little grey on him with a small stiff brush, I then gave him a couple of dirty washes using the black and brown paints and sanded around the edges of him and blended in brown DI and also some silver paint.

To assemble I adhered the background card to the media board and rubbed cosmic blue and fab fuchsia metallic lustres on the skull and chose some remnant rubs to use.

This is ta side view showing a simple stand to make the board stand up.

Thanks for stopping by and maybe you might like to see the project in more finished detail over on the Tando blog.

I hope your weekend is going well and that you get lots of treats and not tricks.

hugs Brenda xxx