HDH - Nosferatu

This week's challenge over at Haunted Design House is Nosferatu Ad nauseam - which means vampires!   I wasn't sure I would have time to play (I totally missed last week because, ugh, life is busy) but I remembered the creepy Nosferatu stamp that I picked up in Vegas and I had to play with it.

So, here's my tribute to the original blood-sucker:

I used watercolor pencils to color him a rather disgusting yellow/brown and then sponged red on top with plastic wrap.  Something I find disgusting is milky eyes - the best monsters have them, so I colored his eyes green and added glossy accents on top.  Yuck!

I'm going to enter this into a few different challenges this week:
Crafting for All Seasons - Spooky
Fussy and Fancy - Anything Goes
4 Crafty Chicks - Spooktacular
Tuesday Throwdown - Halloween

Thanks for looking!

HDH - Bats, Bats, Bats!

Happy Weekend!  Of course, it's time for another Haunted Design House post.  This week, they've chosen Bats in the Belfry - anything to do with bats.  Which, if you know me at all, means that I'm over the moon!

This is how much I love bats: 

I spent a week in Cairns, Australia volunteering at a bat hospital. It was one of the best experiences of my life. I have bat jewelry, clothes, tattoos, decor - my friends all know I love them.

 

The worse part of this week's challenge is the fact that I couldn't really make anything creepy and I made a gazillion things because hey, bats!

 

So, without further ado: 

 

I love this card - the moon is embossed and the bats are actually pieces of confetti that I folded and glued to a hand-drawn line.   It was inspired by a stamp that has birds sitting on a wire.  I think this might be my Halloween card this year.

Below, I went with an embossed background and a simple die-cut 'BOO'.  I stacked some bats  to give a little bit of dimension and added a black pearl.  Simple but pretty.

 

These guys are ridiculous - I don't even know what I was thinking.

 

Below is my version of a sampler that I've seen on the internet in a gazillion places.  I'm not sure I like the color scheme; I may redo it in grey tones.  

 

And finally, here's a quick card that uses tiny little bat punches as a frame.  I planned on putting little pearls on all the bats, but I ran out, so I tried to improvise with gel pen.  Eh.

 

 

There are more, of course, but I think I'll pace myself. 

 

As always, thanks so much for looking!



HDH - Release the Kracken...

I'm back from my travels - it was too hot in Vegas and way to cold in Alaska.  I prefer the dark moist climate of my studio for sure. 

I was extremely excited by this week's Haunted Design House challenge - Creepy Cryptids.   We needed to make something to do with a creature or plant whose existence has been suggested but is unrecognized by scientific consensus and often regarded as highly unlikely! Think Loch Ness Monster, Yeti, even Faeries.

Whoot! I love monsters!  So, of course, the first thing I did was a make a unicorn horn which isn't a monster or creepy, because obviously the two halves of my brain do not work well together.  So I moved to hypocamps - half horse/half fish.   Still not creepy, but I made a cool ATC. 



Most of my stamps aren't really monsters, so I went looking for images online.  The beauty below comes up when you google 'Kraken Coloring Pages' - the image is from Monsters by Mail and I love him. 

 

I colored him with pencils and used a marker to color the background black (semi-successfully now that I see it under the sunlight), made my own frame with die cut waves and accented it with some water droplet ribbon and a small rosette that I made (probably the hardest bit of this card - good lord, those folds were a pain!) and sentiment.  Green pearls were the final touch.   

Thanks for stopping by!