The Tell-Tale Heart

Welcome to October and the beginning of the Halloween projects here on the blog! I will be posting a new project every Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday for sure. A few non-Halloween projects may sneak in there on the other days.

So let's kick this off right!

Being a huge fan of Edgar Allan Poe, his short stories are some of my favorite topics and not just at Halloween time. A few years ago, I made my first canvas dedicated to his famous poem, The Raven. I decided to make another that I could frame, thus the Black Cat.  This year, I decided that this should be an annual (or semi-annual) project.

So this year my Poe dedication is all about "The Tell-Tale Heart".

I distinctly remember two things about this short story..."the beating of his hideous heart" and the reference to the old man's eye. The eye that followed the narrator; the eye that drove him to madness.

Like the other canvases, I wanted to keep a vintage vibe. Naturally, the color palette would have red.

This is an 8 X 10 flat canvas that is framed. I started with covering the background with various scrapbook papers. I added a vintage image of a real heart colored with Distress Ink to grunge it up. I used assorted ephemera to make a small collage corner.

The plastic letters were from my stash and I had to improvise a bit to find all the letters to spell out the title. I used Adirondack Alcohol Ink (Cranberry) to color them. After I glued them down, I used watered down Liquid Pearls (Garnet) to create the drips.

I used various buttons from my stash and relied on the ephemera collection by Tim Holtz for much of the vintage labels. I also added the roses from the Ideaology line as well as some rhinestones and more liquid pearls. The quotes are from the new Clippings stickers for Halloween (also Tim Holtz).

I had to have an eyeball! I needed an anchoring strip to connect my corner collage with the far edge and a wooden plank seemed the way to go. I used a Tim Holtz background stamp (woodgrain) to make my plank and tore a hole in it. The eye is another label from the ephemera set. The small book cover below it says, The Evil Eye.

Another homage to Poe completed! If you like this piece (along with the other two), I am currently offering postcards (get it? "Poe"st cards.) of all three in my Etsy shop. They are offered in a set with two postcards of each design. (And yes, they can be mailed with a postcard stamp! But if you have any of the Poe stamps that the post office offered last year, that would be perfect!)

Stay tuned for more Halloween projects this month!

-Wy
"I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! He had the eye of a vulture--a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees--very gradually--I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever." --Edgar Allan Poe