Everything Dances

Lost Coast Designs and Carmen's Veranda are sponsoring Smeared Ink's 31 Days of Halloween. Every day for the duration of the event, fabulous Halloween inspired art will be shared by the Design Team at the Lost Coast Portal to Creativity.

For today, here is my make :

For this standard sized card I have used the larger skeleton from Dancing Skeletons. I stamped the skeleton in memento black and added depth and shading with copics, cool greys. I outlined the image in black and fussy cut it.

The background was so fun .... I got the idea for the background behind the skeleton from a Youtuber Shana Conroy, a video entitled Dreams. I painted the background with black gesso, then sprayed dylusions sprays and let it dry. I then splashed watered down white gesso onto the background, put a layer of paper on top and pulled it off. Because dylusions sprays react with water, they started to color the white gesso. I let it dry. Doesn't it look awesome, a perfect backdrop for the skeleton.

I layered this card, matting the black with distressed yellow card stock, and I stamped Carmen Veranda's grunge black swirl background onto the card base which I had first colored with distress inks.

The finishing touch was the words, which I typed on my typewriter. Cut them out and edged in black. I love Maya Angelou, and this quote from her suited this project perfectly I think.

I really enjoyed making this card ... so I decided to make a few artist trading cards too :

I used the exact same techniques and stamps, except for the stamping on the blue background. I used the same grunge black swirl, but this time I used the new ATC sized one. How great to have a smaller version for ATC's. The grunge backgrounds are really great, and there are a whole host of ATC background stamps available at Lost Coast Designs.

The words were quite amusing for one of the ATC's. Who remembers the hit from 1993, "Boom! Shake the Room"? Quite funny to link the old-school hip-hop with the dancing skeleton.

Hope you found some inspiration here and please pop over to The Lost Coast Portal to Creativity and Smeared Ink to see the other gorgeous pieces :)