Not every witch lives in Salem

Hey everyone,

it's my favorite crafting time of the year: Halloween! Well, I don't limit the use of all my monstrous, spooky and weird stamps to that one season. But however, here's a little Halloween based inspiration for you.

For this art journal page I'm working in an old book from the 50's. Two tips for you: As the pages are quite fragile, it's better to glue two or three together. And to avoid the book becoming too bulky, just seperate a few pages from time to time. Keep those pages for future projects.
I primed my spread with some heavy gesso and a brayer, leaving enogh "white space" for some of the text to shine through.

Then I tried to figure out how to place my chosen images and stamped them directly on the page. While I got a good impression from the moon in the background, the spooky house didn't look as good as expected and the details got totally lost. Guess my ink pad got a little too dry. But I wasn't too worried about that. I simply stamped the image on a plain white napkin and cut it out (not too neatly). I kept that piece aside and glued it on top of the unsuccessfully stamped image after I added color to the background. 

And coloring the background is already the next step. I used two Lindy's Gang sprays: moonshadow mist in buccaneer bay blue (a brown with a blue touch) and a blazing black flat fabio spray which gets a greyish blue tone when it's dyluted with water. I tried to get as little color as possible onto my stamped images which worked pretty well even if I had been to lazy to mask them.

After that I adhered my napkin piece and added a stamped tree next to the house and some texture to the background. The new mark making stamps do work well, don't you agree?

I staped a witch hat on watercolor paper, colored it with ZIG brush pens and cut it out. As I wasn't sure about which color of the hat would work best, I just did two versions and kept the other one (which is green) for a future project. Then I added some washi tape to the lower right corner, placed the witch hat on top and stamped a quote: Not every witch lives in Salem.

Here are some more photos of my finished project. Hope you like it.

 

 

Stamps used:
Haunted Mansion/Bridge (17883)
The Moon (20157)
Striped Witch Hat (19204)
Assemic Stripes (20576)
Plus Sign Background (20571) 
Fir Trees Silhouette (19723)

Other material:
- old book
- watercolor paper
- heavy gesso
- brayer
- Archival Ink (jet black, watering can, seafarer)
- Versafine Ink (onyx black
- Lindy's Gang sprays (moon shadow mist "buccaneer bay blue"; flat fabio "blazing black")
- ZIG real brush watercolor marker
- washi tape


See you soon!