LOC good/bad luck #69

This week at Left of Centre Challenge blog the digital stamp sponsor is meljens designs, I picked bad-spell to go in with a good luck/bad luck theme. you should check out the designs as shes having a closing down sale..

Its and 8x8 card base, and is made using caught in crystal effect using floor polish, mica paints/powders against acetate and a tissue - i had great fun playing. 

shes coloured using waterbased childrens pens and a water brush, topped with glitter glue.

we're also making 6 word story ATC, this is my version of the frog prince, with the same background, I chopped off the wizard hat and replaced with a crown charm.

the above image is the same ATC photographed without and with a flash, this shows the depth of colour and shine/sparkle hidden in the mica.

its a really fun technique although i would definitely open a window or too..

The theme over at LOC is good or bad luck, why not have a play and enter one of your pieces, you don't have to use a stamp from the sponsor, in fact, you don't need to use a stamp at all, check out the other entries for inspiration and have fun.

thanks for looking, 

jas x 

31 Garden of Hedes

WOW, can you believe we are at 31st October already!!  Happy Halloween.

Jas, I so remember the bent spoons from my Dad trying to 'carve' out a turnip, he always did an amazing job.  Pumpkin carving is so much fun and the design options are endless. Thanks Jas.

What an exciting month its been.  I would like to thank Bex and Jas for joining me on this adventure of creativity and for all their fabulous and inspiring projects.  I have loved every single one of them.

Todays project, well this is the idea that set off the whole Weird Scissors concept of 31 Days of Halloween.  I was sitting on the bus and saw a really cool window display and thought, if only those flowers where skulls, it would be super cool.

Garden of Hedes

Project Preparation

1. Using air dry clay and some skull chocolate molds make up some skulls ( I made 12).

2. Take some old bandage gauze and wet it and colour with alcohol inks to give desired colour.  I rinsed lightly in water to 'dull' the colour.  When dry cut into 8 - 10 pieces, rough rectangles.

Supplies & Instructions

1. Take 1 30cm x 40cm canvas and dribble some deep purple ink from the top, leave to dry.

2. Once dry, slap on a layer of  white gesso, this dulls down the purple drips a bit.

3. Using chalk pastels blend purples and greens to give desired look.

4. Set the pastels, I use Silvikrin hairspary.

5. I found an old thorny rose stamp and stamped it randomly around the canvas with black archival ink.

6. Take the bits of coloured gauze and pull and distress the pieces, and attch to canvas with white craft glue.

7. I painted the skulls with a watered down cream and using the Kaisercraft stamp crackle  and Foggy London ink, 'distressed' the skulls.  I've glued some crystals in the eye sockets, (I just love a bit of bling) then applied the skulls with a hot glue gun.

8. To finsh off I inked around the edges with a black ink.  

I hope you enjoy the piece that was the inspiration for this amazing blog, which would not have been possible without the hard work and dedication of Bex and Jas.   Thank you girls.

I am entering this into the Left of Center Challenge and Open Minded Challenge for Halloween, the Artistic Inspirations for spooky, Ooh La La for the witching hour and the Corrosive Challenge for magical.

Pop back tomorrow.  The fun continues with some Day of Dead inspiration with Bex.

TFL Lou x

29. Colourful Creepy Collage and Wicked Wednesday Giveaway

Giveaway details at the end for impatient ones!

Well, Halloween is nearly upon us, so I thought I would do something that is quick and easy to knock up for when you need that last minute Halloween card, present, or bit of decor. Same technique also works for Christmas too - do I lose points for mentioning the C word already?!

First of all, you need to cut some paper. I used scrap watercolour paper for mine, but it would also work with leftover patterned paper, just with a different result.

I cut mine into inchies (1" square), twinchies (2" square) and rectangles of 1" x 2". 1" x 3" and 2" x 3" as I found these worked best for me. Now, sadly I don't have nearly enough Halloween stamps, but I used what I had and just stamped in black Versafine and inked the edges with the same. I then coloured them with a variety of distress inks and a water brush. Simples. I also did a few shapes just adding googly eyes (yup, still trying to use my stash of those) and highlighted bits with a gel pen.

Now, these shapes should all fit together into a kind of Halloween collage which makes quick and easy cards as you can see.

Apologies for the photos, for some reason when I crop some of my more colourful pics then they just don't work.

I also added some to an 8" square canvas for a bit of home decor. Since this had a sturdier substrate than the card I could add some other elements, such as little charms, glass bottles and my last doll arm left over from the zombie door.

Finally, those 1" x 2" pieces are perfect domino size. Glue one onto a domino, add some glossy accents, and use the same glossy accents to add a bail onto the back, and you have a pretty quick Halloween gift.

So there you go - a few bits of scrap paper, a bit of stamping and colouring, and you have a world of possibilities. If you don't want to bother with the stamping, you could even try the same thing with leftover scraps of patterned paper. The world is your lobster!

And finally, the giveaway. Leave a comment, here or on our facebook group, before midnight GMT on Saturday 1 November to be in with a chance of winning a set of canvas, card and domino pendant. I have TWO sets to give away. Winners will be announced sometime on Sunday 2 November when I've had enough coffee to sort them out! Good luck, and thanks for looking.

I have entered this into the Sisterhood of Snarky Stampers challenge for pink Halloween for the card, the Artistc Inspirations Challenge for spookyand the Left of Center Challenge for Halloween.

Tune in tomorrow to see Jas's last Halloween project.

Bex

28 Witch Wares

Thanks to Virginia for her fabulous post on creating Mail Art, love the idea of giving it away for free. I'm adding a Gelli Plate to my wishlist as those backgrounds are gorgeous.

Todays post is very picture light, I was so engrossed in the 'playing' I forgot to pick up my camera and record the progress.

1. Cover chipboard with a suitable background paper, I printed these free bookcase images from the internet, to age it I swiped Antique Linen distress ink over the whole image.

2. The shelf was made by painting a scrap piece of card dark brown and dry brushing over some copper paint. It was attached with hot glue along with the skulls for support.  

3. The witches hats are little works of origami, instructions HERE , the eyeballs were secured with hot glue.

4.  I attached 3 brass paper fasteners (brads) and hung some worry dolls which I found in my junk box.

5.  The pumpkins were cut from old halloween straws and secured with hot glue.

6.  You can't see it really clearly but the brooms are hanging from a pair of dolls arms leftover from my 'Learner' project (just need to work out what to do with the torso!).  The arms were cut to size, attach to the background with hot glue.

7. To finish off the piece I've added a black sizzix scaredy cat, a red spider and some fake spider web.

Witch Wares is the final piece for my Witch Triptych, along with Learner and Winifred.

I am entering this into the Open Minded Challenge, Left of Center and Oddball Stamps Challenge for Halloween, Artistic Inspirations for spooky. Ooh La La for the witching hour and the Corrosive Challenge for magical.

TFL, pop back tomorrow to see what spookiness Bex has in store for us.

23 It's so Flo!

Today we have another guest designer for you, Sarah, known to many as Flo.

Loving her funky Psychedelic skull, its so Flo!

Details can be found HERE on Sarah's blog.

Thanks for popping by and remember we'd love to see your take on any of our projects, come on don't be shy!  

19 WINIFRED

Today we have something a little different for you.  Enjoy!

Winifred ' A Bad Witch Gone Good '

Win had grown tired of her usual spells

Enduring a lifetime of strong pungent smells

Hemlock and toads in the cauldron would bubble

Creating for mankind all sorts of deep trouble

Not to mention the broomstick that kept breaking down

Leaving her stranded and freezing in town

Yes her tether was taut and her gnarled knuckles white

Beginning to think should she give up the witch fight

A night on the brew and she came to her senses

Sensing her beauty she let down her defences

' I do have a choice!' And with heaven in sight

The heart chains unfolded and the Black Witch turned White

Hearts and souls and Angels wings

Now casting her spells using wonderful things

Sweet aromatics floating into the air

Casting love and light and destroying despair

But as we witches know, this simply can't be

We watched as she thought she could really break free

The sisterhood's grip that creates the worlds struggle

Would never release her from grim toil and trouble

As a lone tear slipped down the beautiful cheek

A witch once grown strong had again become weak

The chains she so heartfelt had wrestled to sever

Now hold her and us in their cold grip forever.

by BJ Crockett

This is a canvas dedicated to Winifred and her life on the dark side, I couldn't resist
including the ball and chain!!   As Winifred went back to her old ways, I decided
to try my hand at an old technique for the silvery web.    

I hope this poem or my canvas inspires you to either write your own wee Halloween ditty or create your own piece of Winifred art.  We'd love you to share either or both with us.

A big thanks to BJ Crockett for her amazing poem, I hope we get a chance to see
more of her poetry soon.

TFL Lou x

18. Penny Dreadful Cameo

Oh we're half way there - feel free to keep singing, well technically we've just crept past the half way mark, if you're staying with us until 2nd Nov.

Hows about we go old school,  very old school, with some Victorian-esq cameos?  I've always loved the classic horrors, where would Halloween be without Dracula, Frankenstein et al, most recently given a reboot by the penny dreadful series on sky. They have well and truly been accepted into popular culture and just their silhouettes are recognisable to almost everybody as proved by the highly successful Olly Moss (graphic artist whos book coincidentally is named Silhouettes from popular culture :)). 

Handy as you don't get much more Victorian than a cameo canvas or two.

Just a little bit girly- Elpheba and Malificent black embossed cameos, printed and clear embossed fussy frame, velvet ribbon, paper lace and lots of glue spot pearls.

Well I say canvas but they are 6"x6" (or folded 6"x12" so they stand on their own) corrugated card bases cut from amazon packaging, covered in papers or book pages.  I didn't have any subtle Halloween papers so downloaded a couple of internet wallpapers, the damask one below has little skulls on, they've been resized, printed and glued to the base.

Decide how or what you will use as a cameo frame, because everything you do after will fit around this, you can get pretty cameo dies or cut outs, download cameo vectors or create your own shapes and patterns depending on your software. 

 I didn't have a die or time to buy precut ones but I still did the next bit 3 different ways. 

1) using a very delicate vector frame I pasted the image onto my background, printed the background and frame together and then roughly cut around the image, this saves on the fussy cutting by helping the spare bits camouflage into the background.

2) printed the frame onto acetate. again this halves the fussy cutting and stops you from getting an obvious border.

3) cut out an easy shape from card or fussy cut as much as you like.

Next I picked some of my favourite film characters and found a picture of them side on, using the mirror function if I needed to change their direction, printed it the size needed to fit, again I've found the top 3 ways to do this.

1) I printed the image onto heavy weight paper in a very light draft, cut around the image turned it over and embossed it with black power.

2) Printed the image on very thin printer paper on a very light draft, gently stuck it to some black card and cut around it,

3) print or draw on acetate in a heavy black - although I'm not keen on this effect as its just not as opaque enough and you either have to cut around it, or you have a shiny frame, but it is the quickest route so it really just depends on what you're going for.

Nosferatu and Frankenstein cut from black card, transparency frame, on a book plate background is getting a heavy dose of TH's film strip when it comes out of hiding.

Arrange it all together on your background, vignette around the edges and corners using distress ink, adding little bits to tie it all together - some velvet ribbon and lace, some flowers or film tape, however you want to go just enjoy. 

Book plate background of Werewolf and Invisible Man, transparency frames with black card cameos 

Cult film hand cut frames, with glue spot faux pearls/nailheads, transparency printed cameo (thanks to Olly Moss) and string.  Maybe it needs a 'who you gonna call? Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice titles added, who knows.

I am entering this into the Oddball Stamps Chalenge blog for spooky.

Hope you've liked this project, if you've given it a go please post your pictures on our fb page, I really would like to see them.

Join us again soon. 

Jas x 

This weeks wicked Wednesday Winners for the Junk key, kilt pin or earings are in no particular order:

Susibee

Carmen

Pauline

If your name matches the above and you posted on our blog or FBpage between Saturday 1201 and Friday Midnight, email your address to Minerva27.jg@googlemail.com and I'll post one of the items to you

Thanks for joining us, and keep an eye out for our next give away.