We’ll be heading into spooky season soon, so if you like to celebrate Hallowe’en, it’s time to get creating! We used to ‘do’ Hallowe’en when the boys were young, but those days are gone. And we live in a small crescent, so we don’t even have many little goblins coming around for candy, if any. You know what that means? Yup – more candy for us! LOL Okay, I’m getting ahead of myself here. I’ve just done my first spooky painting, complete with witch and black cat. Right now the Alcohol Ink Fall Conference is happening, and this was one of the first tutorials. One nice thing about the Conference is that even if you can’t attend the live tutorial, you have access to the recording, forever!
SPOOKY SCENE
This is a quick & easy painting to do. If you like to hand out Hallowe’en cards, you could scale down the size to 4″ x 5 1/4″ from 5″ x 7″. Plus, there’s minimal supplies needed.
Isn’t this cute? And not too scary!
PAINTING DETAILS
On a 5″ x 7″ piece of Yupo (or smaller, if you’re going to do cards), create the background by blending Sunshine Yellow and Sunset Orange with a bit of 99% isopropyl alcohol. You want to keep the colours bright, so don’t use too much alcohol. Next, lift off a circle of the colour with either a Fanstastix and alcohol, or a Blending Pen – this will be your moon. It doesn’t wipe back to white, but that’s okay. It adds to the spooky feeling! Now, draw in your witch on the broomstick with a .05 Micron black pen, and colour it in. Next, draw out your spooky tree, and use the Micron Brush pen to colour in the largest parts of the trunk. Use a .08 size for the branches, and then back to the .05 for the skinniest branches. Or – just use what you have! If you don’t have Micron pens, you can use Sharpies, or Posca Paint Pens. You could also paint with the Pitch Black ink and a small brush. The last drawing is the cat – just leave what would be the ‘whites’ of his eyes uncoloured – this makes them look like they’re glowing orange.
If you’re not the best at drawing (like me), you can start out by tracing or sketching the images onto the Yupo in pencil, before inking the background.
When your drawings are all dry, pick up some Amethyst ink with a medium brush, and splatter it on the background. Repeat with the orange and yellow. To avoid splattering the black images, you can mask them off with scraps of paper, before splattering.
The splatters add some fun texture and colour interest to the overall painting.
GET INTO THE SPOOKY SEASON FEELING
Unsplash and Pixabay are 2 great online sites for finding royalty free images that you can use for your art. Look for some different ghoulish images, like a haunted house, ghosts, or other spooky cats. You can even do pumpkins – just change your background colours, maybe to shades of purple and dark grey! Whatever you do, have fun creating!
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So fun! I love your tree. Quirky and spooky without the “scare factor.”