The Poison Prince

I´ve just been playing with the new Oxford Impressions stamps, so here´s my Poison Prince ATC.

Who´s That Knocking?

Image you´re alone in your house on Halloween, and suddenly you hear someone knocking at the door ...
Here´s my black/orange/green/purple card for this week´s SPA Halloween challenge using two of the fabulous Land of Nod freebies.

It´s Almost Party Time

Yes, it´s time to decorate for your Halloween Party, and this witch has already gathered what she needs to have a good time! As the Halloween season comes to an end, Hidden Vintage Studios have come out with their latest Halloween kits "Toad Emporium" and "Always Practice Safe Hex" that were combined with several other Hidden Vintage Studios kits in my digital collage above.

Chasing Deadlines

If you´re swapping internationally, deadlines for special holidays can be pretty early - so the deadline for this year´s Red Lead Christmas swaps is the end of October, which means that I had to send my items before mid October to make sure they arrive in time.

The first swap is for Old Fashioned Christmas ornaments, the second one for wooden Holiday hangers.
I´ve had fun making these though I´m not really in a Christmas mood yet.

A Haunting We Will Go ...

... was the theme for our monthly ATC exchange. As both ATC go to the same swap partner, I´ve tried to make mine quite different: Whereas the first one is a painted collage on a painted and taped background, the second one uses a transparency stamped from both sides and dyed with alcohol inks.

Vintage Woodland Revisited

When Seth Apter asked for my favourite own artwork in his survey "Playing Favorites" you find on his blog today, I only thought about it for a moment and then picked this journal page I´ve made back in 2008.

I´ve been in a group of ladies then who exchanged tip-in pages (front and back, not spreads), each in a different format and size (some even round or house shaped) and theme. We´ve had themes like Vintage Christmas, Rainbow, Wisdom, and a lot more - my own book had a raven theme of course ;-)
It was a fun group and I´ve loved making my pages, getting to know the participants and taking the challenge of working in given themes and formats, but in the end my favourite pages have been those for a theme I didn´t understand at first: Vintage Woodland. The lady who had chosen it had described it like this: Forest with birds/eggs; think woodsy and be creative ... well, not easy. I knew I would incorporate birds, so I chose some favourite bird and nest stamps as well as some old book pages with an appropriate theme. And then I stumbled upon a sort of paper that was made from a thin piece of cork, and I immediately knew that this would be the perfect base for my wood; it really looked like soil. I added some vintage postage stamps and stamped and cut out a few leaves, then picked a rusty paper to keep it all together. I arranged all my items until I was satisfied, and then there was a problem: I wasn´t able to just glue my stuff to the cork, so I had to find another way to assemble my pages. I had bought a sewing machine some time ago, but I couldn´t sew - but I had to give it a try here! So I made separate front and back pages, glued everything together and then used my sewing machine in addition to fix it all. When I was ready, I sew both pages together back to back and ended with a single page that I really loved and that seemed to fit the theme perfectly. But was I loved most about it was that I had taken the challenge and tried a technique I´ve never used before. Thanks for the challenge, Patti! I hope your book has been a beauty in the end!

Steampunk´d

I love everything Steampunk, so I didn´t hesitate to join a Steampunk themed one on one postcard swap in a Yahoo group I´ve joined just recently - can´t wait to see the cards I´ll receive! My own cards will travel to Michigan and Texas tomorrow, and I hope they´ll do it full steam ahead!

Autumn is here!

It´s getting colourful outside my window - today the sky is blue, and the trees on the other side of the street have dyed their leaves in a beautiful range of yellow, red, and green. You´ll find those great colours, a lot of fruit and flowers as well as Thanksgiving and other autumnal stuff in Marsha´s latest image kit called "Autumn Junqe" - and again there are jpgs included to print out as collage sheets. Just go and have a look at the Tumble Fish Studio shop at DeviantScrap.com.
My sample collage above is made with this new kit exclusively, whereas the collage below combines the new images with some of Marsha´s background papers from older kits. This couple is on diet, so I hope they won´t be too frustrated looking at the Thanksgiving buffet!

The Raven

Yeah, this week´s SPA theme for the Halloween month is Ravens! I´ve made a cut and paste postcard using an image from a movie advertisement that immediately caught my eye - simple but stunning. I altered it and added rubber stamps from Green Pepper Press, Viva Las Vegas and Stampington and a few papers, and then it needed NOTHING MORE.

Caught on Film

Do you know Eadweard Muybridge? Even if you think you don´t, I´m pretty sure you´ve seen some of his photos. His serial images of motion are similar to the motion studies in Futurism, but these were painted about a decade later. In my ATC series about Muybridge´s work, I´ve used prints of his photos as inkjet transfers, then coloured them and combined them with rubber stamps I have in my collection. If you take a close look, you´ll notice that the stamps on the two ATCs on the left are based on original Muybridge figures.

Auntie´s Special Day

Well, you´ve already met Uncle Wolfgang, so now it´s time to introduce Aunt Ingomar from the lovely new kit from Hidden Vintage Studios at Deviant Scrap! If you´re looking for some cool Halloween images, just have  look at this kit here. And as always, the kit also contains the images on collage sheets that you can print and use for your cut and paste artwork.

Ravens

If you´re a regular visitor on my blog, you already know that I love ravens and crows, so of course I had to join the latest Raven ATC swap in one of my Yahoo groups. These all have a shrink plastic element on them.
The first and the last one have been made using the soot stamping technique, then have been scratched.
The last ATC features a quote from Alice in Wonderland, thus the shrunk Alice on it ...

Full Moon

When I saw this week´s SPA challenge theme "By the Light of the Full Moon", I decided to use a photo of the moon that I took last weekend - yes, we´ve had full moon last Sunday! I added elements from Holliewood Studios, Terri Kahrs, Marta van Eck, Downunder Studios, Cryztal Rain and Beth Rimmer and finished my piece with textures from Kim Klassen and Shadowhouse Creations. Hope you´ll like it!

Of Ravens and Wolves

It´s Monday again, so it´s time for some new Halloween kits from Hidden Vintage Studios! My digital collage above features a witchy cabinet card from the lovely Witchy Women kit (combined with elements from Downunder Studios and Marta van Eck).

And these two collages have been made with the new Uncle Wolfgang kit - how could they know that it´s the name of one of my uncles? I haven´t seen him for a few years, so who knows if he´s got whiskered in the meantime?
(The collage above, "Full Moon", combines the kit with images from Holliewood Studios, the one below, "The Burnsides Brothers" - don´t they remind you of the Blues Brothers? - uses images from several Hidden Vintage Studios kits only).
As always, you´ll find all images as pngs as well as jpgs, so you can use them digitally or for your cut and paste collages.