Halloween Art

It's been 2 weeks since we gathered together to swap pages for the Halloween Swap. I didn't want to share my pages until I was able to put one of two books together and mail it off to my sister who had no idea she was going to get one of these for her birthday. Although I haven't heard from her yet, I'm sure the box has made it since being mailed last Tuesday.

Pictured above are the 33 or so pages of my "Dulce Recuerdo," (Sweet Memory), page.
This page was inspired by the sugar skulls that are exchanged during "Dia de los Muertos," (Day of the Dead), rituals at this time of year. I saw an image online of transparent skull shapes layered over one another and I wanted to do something similar.

The brightly colored skulls are die cut tissue paper. I didn't know I could cut tissue paper on a die cut machine but I hadn't heard you couldn't so I gave it a try and it worked. Good thing too because there's no way I would have cut all those skulls! The tissue skulls were layered onto tag board using PVA. Bleeding wasn't much of an issue.

I found a sugar skull image online to use as a starting point for my design. I traced the shape onto heavy vellum that'd I'd painted with a wash of pearlescent white. I'd been tempted to glue sugar or salt shaped skulls but was concerned about bugs. After all the work with the tissue skulls, I didn't want to cover them completely and the vellum was exactly where I remembered putting it. Yea! No major excavation was required in the studio.

The vellum skull was machine sewn onto the background. Each skull was individually decorated with Sharpie Paint markers. No two images were alike!
In order to make two books I made two pages for the swap. I was stumped for what to do for page two until I came across this sweet kitty. I am so a dog person but this cat was "the ONe" once I saw it.

The background is glued layers of black and white pages cut from old art magazines. A wash of blue/black acrylics were painted over the surface. The full moon is the same layers of magazine with an acrylic, white pearlescent wash and glued white mesh. It's sewn onto the background. Kitty is a cut b/w copy and the hat was cut from a discarded page from a book. Portfolios and markers were used on the hat. The title was colored with Portfolios and stapled in place.
33 pages made for some bulk everyone had different approaches for putting their book together. I used large binder rings, which usually drive me crazy because the books sag but I bought acrylic pages which would keep the book upright.

I stamped images from the new Tim Holtz unmounted Halloween stamps set on the acrylic pages.
The Vampire teeth card holder was bought at Pottery Barn. They were so hilarious, I had to buy them.
I sanded and then painted the binder rings with alcohol inks. Layers of ribbon were knotted onto the rings and then I added a little message to my sister using word and letter beads on colored safety pins.

The book is an absolute treasure! It's super tough to select a favorite page-there were soooooo many good ones. I'll share some of them this week as we count down to Halloween.