Halloween art

These are the ones that I made for Beth as a thank you for hostessing the swap. I didn't want to show them until she had them so they would be a surprise. She posted that she received them and was so sweet in her comments about liking them. The bottom tags started out with some color spray inks of yellow, orange, and red and then some black gesso painted on before adding the collage elements. The moon and star on one are punched out but on the "Boo" tag I found that using an orange and yellow paint pen over the black gesso while both were still wet made a cool swirly/blending of the colors. I outlined them in glitter after the paint dried for a smoother edge. I had printed off some vintage photos onto some photo paper to use in Halloween art. I've found out now in working on this stuff that I should have set the pictures some how before trying to use them. Not sure what would be best for that, maybe a spray matte sealer. If water, glue, or paint got anywhere on the image it smears it. Guess this is the concept behind image transfers which I've not been sucessfull with yet. The smallest tag began with a sturdy clothing tag. I love to save the interesting ones. Gessoed it and then added a dotted background paper, printed Halloween image(that was rescued from previously mentioned damage with additions of paint and glitter on her cape), pencil, marker, and more gesso.

The top picture is a faux altered cabinet card. I've only a few actual cabinet cards in my collection so far and have been unable to bring myself to use the originals. I have some old photo mattes that I wanted to use with a printed vintage image but didn't have one the right size. You might remember in the last post I did about thrift store purchases my mentioning using the matt from a purchased old frame. This is where I used it. I glued the photo inside surrounded by some torn papers and then stuck that to the old backing that was also in the frame, making it end up looking like a cabinet card. The strap is a piece of a belt cut to size with a grommet in the top and old jewelry used for embellishments. I saw from Beth's post that the bottom dangly didn't make it through delivery. Sorry, Beth, this is a pic of where it is supposed to be. I had some problems with this pic when I glued her hat on, so in an attempt to fix it, I used some paint on her face and hair and ended up liking it and it became the theme. "Giselda thought her makeup made her look less witchy".