Morella Canvas

Welcome to the first day of my month of Halloween blog posts! If you've been following me, you know I love Halloween. Here on the blog there will be a new post every Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday, just like last year! This year I am trying to keep to a couple themes. I thought that would narrow down my project choices and make it easier to focus on getting projects done. If I have carte blanche, I tend to get too many ideas in my head and nothing ever gets finished.

So this year, my themes are Witches and Green. Be forewarned that I also have a healthy dose of the Pantone color of the year, Ultra Violet. I did give myself lots of flexibility on these themes and a couple projects don't fit in but they satisfy my need to use up scraps! But onward to the first project!

I like to start things off with a tribute to Edgar Allan Poe. My past efforts have paid homage to "The Raven", "The Black Cat", and "The Tell-Tale Heart". (Postcards of these three efforts can be found in my Etsy store. They are a nice flat version of the original artwork that you can send to your Poe-loving friends for Halloween. Or in my case, anytime.) The series is mostly the same size and feel. The first, The Raven, is a bit different than the rest but it was the first and I had not yet imagined it as a continuing series. But now that it is, I want to try to keep it cohesive.

There are plenty of stories and poems that I'm itching to work into a canvas but in keeping with my Witch theme, I felt the story, "Morella", was my best bet. Surely if Morella had lived in Salem with a less than loving husband, she would have been burned at the stake...or maybe she was in a past life. Anyway, here's my next piece in my Edgar Allan Poe series.

Morella:  My starting point was in what I wanted to keep consistent throughout the whole series. That became the background paper of torn dictionaries, the lettering of the title being big and bold, and a picture of the author. I want those three things to appear throughout the series, in some form or another. (I mean, I'm gonna run out of those little plastic alphabet letters sometime. So any large alphabet will have to be substituted eventually.) I rather like this method as it gives me a starting point, something that begins the forward motion.

So tearing up dictionary paper is always fun and then pulling out those letters to spell my title was relatively easy. Fortunately for me, I was able to spell the name using green and black letters. I didn't have to resort to re-coloring some others to make them match. (Like I did in the Tell-Tale Heart)

The picture of Poe had been sitting on my desk since last October. It was the last of a collage sheet and I knew it was going to be THE picture I used for my next canvas. Since the background was such a murky, creepy green, I made that color one of the themes as well. It also allowed me to go through my embellishments faster as I was only searching for green items. I've always thrown in basic black to reinforce the classic vibe.

After that, I became a little lost as to how to tie this thing together. My initial idea was to do what I had done before on a project...use a cauldron with steam to make a ghostly face. But in searching through my Halloween stamp collection, I found this laboratory set from Inkadinkado. If Morella was a modern day woman, she wouldn't be stirring a cauldron, she'd be working for a big pharmaceutical corporation in a lab. She's be a modern day necromancer seeking the cure for all ails. I kept with my eerie green color and threw in some yellow to brighten it even more. As many folks know, I can't have a laboratory beaker without an eyeball or two. Once these were stamped and cut out, I decided to work on her eyes. And whoa, it was a little challenging.

I want you to know that I did originally have a pair of eyes that I myself had drawn. And I felt good about them. I thought they turned out fairly well and I had them all glued on there and everything. But after setting the piece aside for a couple days, I came back to it and wondered if I could find something better. I was unhappy with the size. If this pair of eyes was going to look into your soul, they needed to be bigger and they needed to be more realistic. I rummaged through my magazine cut-outs even though I was pretty sure all my eyes had been used up. I was also pretty sure they would all be the same size as the ones I had drawn. But lo and behold, I came upon these eyes. I have no idea where they came from or what I even had in mind for them but these pretties fit the bill perfectly. So I ripped off my old eyes and replaced them with these.

So that's my newest canvas in the Poe series. It will join my "Poe-st cards" at some point in the Etsy shop.

Stay tuned all month long for more Halloween projects, some big, some small. If you love Halloween, you won't want to miss a post. Follow me here on Blogger, or like my Facebook page to keep updated on new posts, stop by my Etsy store anytime, and I certainly would appreciate you sharing anything you like with your friends.

Happy October 1st!
-Wy
"In this town we call home, everyone hail to the Pumpkin Song!"