JackOWLantern

I do love Halloween-- after all, it is the oddest of holidays! To paraphrase Dickens, I honor Halloween in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. But especially today, of course!

I'll add an illuminated nocturnal view of the JackOWLantern tonight, once I get home from a Halloween Hoop Jam in the park, with costumes. Oh boy, I just can't wait! What are your plans for the evening?

Happy Halloween to all! Oh, & check out ArtBizBlog today-- along with some great advice about artists' fears, you may see a familiar skeleton monster creeping by! :-)

Edit: As promised, the JackOWLantern in its nocturnal glory. :-) Sorry, no photos from the Hoop Jam, but it was great!

Mini Monster Mash

I'm feeling a bit dizzy at the moment, with five different projects underway (in addition to Flash classes & deadlines) & none of them quite scanner-ready.

So I decided to post this little doodle, completed while watching online Flash tutorials, in between taking notes on the stuff I needed to know. (Yes, I do take notes with a crow-quill sometimes! Call me antediluvian,* but it helps keep my calligraphic hand in fighting trim.)

I thought it looked a little like a particularly odd Halloween party.

I draw this sort of nonsense often-- it helps calm me down when my brain is boiling. You should see my college calculus notebooks. By the way, I firmly believe that doodling helps me concentrate. I caught no end of grief for it in school (even though I made good grades) but a couple of years ago I saw this study & felt vindicated. :-D

Hunt's flexible crow-quill pen & ink on legal pad, ~3"x4"

*This is actually a teaser for one of the pieces I'm working on!

A is for Amikiri

Today is a red-letter, red-monster day: the beginning of a new alphabet project, AlphaBeasts!

Successor to Ben Towle's Animal Alphabet, this one is hosted by Andrew Neal & will center on mythical creatures. I think it may be even more fun than the last! I'm hoping to do all 26 letters, & looking forward to discovering many new oddities along the way.


My first AlphaBeast is the Amikiri, or Net Cutter, from Toriyama Sekien's Gazu Hyakki Yakō. I'd never heard of this curious creature with its very specific form of mischief before. I certainly hope it leaves my curtains & fishnets alone!

While this is AlphaBeast No.1, it is also Her Odd Materials No.13. Hmm, sounds like something from mystic numerology.... Acrylic on a cutting from a Larkin Catalog, c.1940, ~5"X6", found at the Fleam of course.

By the way, if you'd like to see my entries for the last series, Animal Alphabet, you'll find most of them on my sketch/process blog, Curious Art Lab. I was late to the party though, so you won't find all 26 letters there, alas!

Light-Headed Contraption

I loved IF's prompt this week-- I only wish I had more time to make more elaborate contraptions! But I'm crazy busy all week, so just time for a quickie today. 

Acrylic on found red light bulb, antique shears & miniature pliers, held together (badly) with copper & brass wire. About 5½" tall.

Her Odd  Materials No. 12

Home for Halloween

I thought I'd try my hand at animating Home Sweet Home. This is pretty rough. Flash is definitely an "Odd Material" as far as I'm concerned. I know it's second nature for some people, but I find it both frustrating & fascinating. For one thing, I still don't quite understand why some videos export & post without issues, & others simply refuse to cooperate.

Do you hear "Happy Halloween" in the audio, or am I hallucinating from excessive computer hours? It was a free download by alextundra, btw, from freesound.org.

Flash, Photoshop, acrylic over text from an old dictionary. I wonder if my mixed media conglomerations will some day reach critical mass & explode. They have already had questionable effects on my computer, & possibly my brain.

edit: At Ted's request I'm including a looped version, for those who are gluttons for punishment!

B-Side Beastie

I was sorting through a box of Victorian scrap hunting for something to use in Her Odd Materials, when I happened to glance at the back side of one of them, & immediately saw a monster-head. So of course I painted it!

The image below is the original chromolith, i.e. the A-side of the Oddment. (If you're having trouble seeing the shape, note that it's rotated 90° & flipped. Her head is the beastie's nose.)

H.O.M No.7: Acrylic on reverse of Victorian scrap, ~2½x3½"

If you missed the link on the last oddment, I'm a "Cryptkeeper" for countdowntohalloween.com-- be sure to check out the other spooky/monstrous/festive blogs on the site!

Oddment Sings the Blueb's

It's October! Time to curl up & hide!

Okay, not really. I love October-- the crisp weather, the leaves turning, Halloween*-- also, it's always my month to host Book Club, which I thoroughly enjoy. It's actually not until November that I start to feel tinges of those Winter blues, drifting toward the "discouraged, morbid & ill."

Truth to tell, today's experiment was a bit discouraging too. I tried blueberry ink for the first, & probably the last, time. I had some "blueb's" that were beginning to go mushy, so I picked out the bad ones, smashed them up with a bit of white vinegar & salt to preserve color & prevent ickies, & strained them 3 times. Then I tried to concentrate the color in the microwave. Having made jelly in the past, I should have known better!

Due to the sugar & pectin in the fruit, it was very hard to get the ink dark enough to be more than faintly visible without having it gel up. I never did achieve a strength & consistency that satisfied me. Also despite using a super-fine strainer, there were little dark flecks in the ink that were a bit irritating. But oh well, the pallor, spottiness & stickiness sort of fit the gloomy theme. And experiment, successful or not, is part of the idea behind Her Odd Materials. (This is H.O.M. No. 6.)

Pencil, blueberry ink & white gouache on found paper, with some Photoshop tweaking.

The background of this one is a page from Reading Character At Sight, Seven Simple Lessons by Katherine M.H. Blackford, M.D., ©1922. The book is hilarious reading, purporting to psychoanalyze strangers instantly, using such vital clues as the fineness of their hair. It seems to be aimed mainly at salesmen. It was of course a Fleam Find.

*Fellow Halloween enthusiasts might be interested in countdowntohalloween.com, a blog that rounds up blogs with an October focus on Halloween. I'll be participating in this year's countdown!