Annabel Lee: Edgar Allan Poe Series

 Last year, I brainstormed a bunch of ideas for the works of Edgar Allan Poe. I hashed through a few of them so I'd have a starting point if I got behind the 8-ball come October. Guess what? Behind the 8-ball!

Out of the three ideas I started, I chose the poem, "Annabel Lee". I felt that I would be able to work this into the "collection" with relative ease. I had been trying to keep my works within a certain color way and I had not yet done blue. The references in this poem to the sea inspired me that way.

While the year 2020 certainly lent itself to be the year of the "Red Death", I didn't have that one fleshed out enough to get it done for October. But I may work on it now that my Halloween projects are completed and I am not yet inspired for Christmas. 

Here's what I made:

If you recall, I do have a few parameters that I try to meet in each of these canvases in order to keep them somewhat cohesive. They all must display the title, they all must have a picture of Poe, they all must have a torn paper background (mostly). I try to keep it looking rather "vintage" but that's a loose rule.

The poem inspired certain elements; the tomb that opens into the sea, the moon, and the bride. 

I like how "the tomb" seems to be a doorway into a new realm and how the eye is drawn into it.

This canvas is complete enough for me to make a digital file of it. But I do intend to add more 3-D elements to it, specifically small seashells along the very bottom. Since those would not scan very well, I have left them off until I have a good digital rendering. 

This makes the 6th piece in the Poe collection. (I may be ready to do a set of notecards.) The others in this series can also be seen here on the blog in various October posts or search by label "Edgar Allan Poe". They are, in order of completion; The Raven, The Black Cat, The Tell-Tale Heart, Morella, The Haunted Palace, and now, Annabel Lee.

Have a very Happy Halloween and Stay Safe! Today of all days is the time to Wear a Mask!

-Wy

Ghosts in the Graveyard

 Here's a favorite project of mine this year! My original idea, the first idea, was to make Edgar Allan Poe's gravesite atop a stack of books. Poe may or may not be buried in this little graveyard but I kept the idea of using a stack of books. It's the closest I've gotten to doing another altered book in a long time so I'm counting it as a goal accomplished! 

Ghosts in the Graveyard:  A couple years ago I set up a party scape with a stack of books with titles that I thought reflected the Halloween mood. I had about 5 or 6 of them and I thought at the time of attaching them all together to make a permanent arrangement. Since I never got around to it, I decided to take from that stack and use a few for this display.

I won't take you through every little step but I'll try to point out a few things through the photos of the finished project. I relied heavily on items from Tim Holtz's Halloween lines of Ideaology. These are a variety of items some from my stash; some I bought brand new this year. My vision for the graveyard really took off when I realized the Metal Fence fit "just so" on the top book I was using for my base.

This photo gives a good depiction of the graveyard. I covered the book with a sheet of  paper from Tim Holtz's Abandoned stash. (So happy that I finally got my hands on this paper stash! It is mesmerizing how much pattern and color is in it. Truly a sheet for any project.) Those rocks are some kind of foam bead that I had in my stash and never used. Its a good filler when you're attaching large items with texture paste as it fills in the gaps. I just spread on the texture paste and lightly pressed these into it. Mummy cloth adds a bit of light fog around the edges and the brush bottle trees in the back were sprayed with several different shades of ink to fit my color palette. While I used some Evergreen Bough, Shaded Lilac, and Gathered Twigs (Distress stain), my main color was Whale Watch Blue from Lindy's. This cold blue-gray color was exactly what I wanted to reflect a foggy chilly Halloween night. I sprayed the texture paste and foam beads with this color and the mummy cloth to match.

I added details to the tombstones in the front. I placed a creepy eye on one and set a skull beside the other. I added small ruby rhinestones into the skulls eyes, the only deviation from my washed out color palette. If you look closely at the gravestones in the back row, just before the trees, they may seem familiar. I used old chess pieces. I took the black ones and gave them a little coat of gray paint then added little splotches of black to make them seem old and weathered. I colored a pearl with purple alcohol ink to set atop the rook to resemble a gazing ball.

I added the ghosts after staring at it awhile and deciding I wanted a vertical element. It was feeling very "horizontal"...your eye tracked left and right but not up and down. The ghosts helped with that and I LOVE these ghosts. They remind me of the ones in The Nightmare Before Christmas that fly over during the Pumpkin Song.

The advantage of using a stack of books is that books can be carved out. So I carved out the bottom book just enough to fit in the smallest of vignette boxes. Now because no one was going to be opening this book, I could make the cuts sloppy and just hide the edge with paper. The zombie hand (that I had to buy as it came in the pack with the tombstones) made a perfect drawer pull. (Though I admit that at a distance, this zombie hand looks like it's giving me the finger!) The items in the drawer are all that remains of the Edgar Allan Poe idea. I thought, "if I went through a secret drawer in Poe's office, what might I find?" None of these items are glued down so they can be removed from the drawer and examined. I wonder what the skeleton key unlocks?

So what's the best part about this project? It lights up!

I hid a string of purple tiny lights around the perimeter of the graveyard. That was the point of the mummy cloth, really, to hide the lights. While the cloth didn't diffuse the lights as much as I would have liked, it looks way better in person that it does in these photos. I love how the ghosts practically disappear in the darkness.

 Let's talk about those lights for a minute. When I saw that these colored lights were available, I immediately bought 2 sets. I had not invested in the regular tiny lights because I thought they'd be hard to incorporate into vignette boxes...you'd have to drill a hole in the back to put the wire through...I'm not that handy. But knowing that there was no "back" to this project...no walls so to speak; it would be relatively easy to rig the string of lights. The battery pack sits in it's own little paper box that is attached to the top book as shown. I used a whole strand of lights and taped it down with some washi tape that was reinforced with collage medium. That held the wire down so that I could then cover them with the stained mummy cloth and glue the cloth down around the lights to also keep them in place. I think I now want to add lights to everything!

I have added this scene to my newly created "Halloween nook" in my craft space and it will stay up year round along with many of my other altered projects. 

Thanks for hanging with me to the end!

Stay safe out there! Wear your mask, wash your hands, social distance! Yes, it's important.

-Wy

The Haunted Palace Canvas/Collage

Every year I make a new Edgar Allan Poe canvas.
This year is no different.

What is different is that this one reflects more on the present day. Take from it what you will.

 Poe's The Haunted Palace:  This year's selection is a poem that struck just the right chord in me. I kept to my collage, vintage look as well as bits of buttons and a bold title. The author makes a less predominant appearance but he's in there. Different in this one is that I actually added in a quote from Poe's work, the stanza where I drew most of my inspiration. I had my doubts about this canvas from the start but I am pleased with the results. For those who are unfamiliar with this title, I include Poe's work in the rest of this post.

In the greenest of our valleys

By good angels tenanted,

Once a fair and stately palace—

Radiant palace—reared its head.

In the monarch Thought’s dominion,

It stood there!

Never seraph spread a pinion

Over fabric half so fair! 

Banners yellow, glorious, golden,

On its roof did float and flow

(This—all this—was in the olden

Time long ago)

And every gentle air that dallied,

In that sweet day,

Along the ramparts plumed and pallid,

A wingèd odor went away.

Wanderers in that happy valley,

Through two luminous windows, saw

Spirits moving musically

To a lute’s well-tunèd law,

Round about a throne where, sitting,

Porphyrogene!

In state his glory well befitting,

The ruler of the realm was seen.

And all with pearl and ruby glowing

Was the fair palace door,

Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing

And sparkling evermore,

A troop of Echoes, whose sweet duty

Was but to sing,

In voices of surpassing beauty,

The wit and wisdom of their king.

But evil things, in robes of sorrow,

Assailed the monarch’s high estate;

(Ah, let us mourn!—for never morrow

Shall dawn upon him, desolate!)

And round about his home the glory

That blushed and bloomed

Is but a dim-remembered story

Of the old time entombed.

And travellers, now, within that valley,

Through the red-litten windows see

Vast forms that move fantastically

To a discordant melody;

While, like a ghastly rapid river,

Through the pale door

A hideous throng rush out forever,

And laugh—but smile no more.

I will be adding this to my "Poe-st" cards at my Etsy Shop soon. I also have a few Halloween mixed-media canvases there for sale. Take a look if you're in the market for some new spooky décor.

Thanks!
-Wy

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!"

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

Poe Appreciation Day Blog Hop: Tag Book (2)

I did it!
I finished the Poe-ms Tag Book.
I even like it! (though one tag is a bit underwhelming)

I'm linking this to the Poe Blog Hop sponsored by Lost Coast Designs. Please check out all the other Bloggers involved in this Hop by clicking on the photos at the bottom of the post. They are linked to blogs that will give you some great Poe inspiration.

If you missed the first tags in this "book", you can check out this post.

The Bells:   This is the tag that doesn't thrill me. I should have gone with my first instinct which was to use some kind of music sheet as the background. But I was lazy. So this tag for one of my favorite poems may get a do-over. "What a world of solemn thought their monody compels!"

Annabel Lee:  This tag turned out better than my original idea. Initially, I was going to place a mausoleum or tomb by the edge of the sea. But when I went through my Lost Coast stamps, I found the door used here. It was perfect for her "tomb by the sounding sea". I stamped it with a grey ink, detailed it with a gold pen, then went over the whole thing with Broken China Distress Stain. The blue stain turns slightly greenish over manilla tags and I loved the submerged feeling it provides.

I added the shells along the border between the torn edge of the tag and the blue acetate that I used for my sea. I stamped the Bubbles background (Lost Coast Designs) to give it the wavy texture in Azure blue StaZon ink. Shells are stamps from Lawn Fawn. (Critters in the Sea set) "It was many and many a year ago in a kingdom by the sea..."

 The Haunted Palace:  Having re-read this poem for inspiration, I discovered this line, "And all with pearl and ruby glowing was the fair palace door". So my original idea became the second tag and this line became the "door". I used the window from Lost Coast Designs and cut out the spaces with a craft knife. The "door" is embossed and colored with Distress markers. I added a few pearls for decoration and a brad for my handle.

The second, or inside, tag was covered with patterned paper. I stamped the skeleton (this one is from Tim Holtz but Lost Coast does have a brand new one!) in white pigment ink then embossed it.The smaller stamps were from my stash.

The Sleeper:   This tag had already been started so I just finished off the details. I attached the vellum ghost with glue underneath the rose. That rose is a hand-carved stamp I made and it's colored with a Sakura glaze pen so it appears a bit glossy. The dirt of the fresh grave is copper embossing powder. "I pray to God that she may lie forever with unopened eye while the pale sheeted ghosts go by."  

The Conqueror Worm:  Another favorite poem of mine. I just free handed all of this as I had a particular vision in my head. I wanted the worm to be like the Ouroboros, the snake or dragon that devours it's own tail. I wanted a very subterranean feel to reflect burial. The coffin image I added last as the space in the center bothered me. Since "the play is the Tragedy: Man", I felt that this was as good a symbol as any. This one looks much better in person as the camera had a hard time picking up the metallic glow of the worm. "Through a circle that ever returneth in to the self-same spot"

So there she is! I may add a back cover with another picture of Poe but I'm happy with it for now. I can finally cross this project off the list!

Remember if you love Poe, check out the links at the bottom of the post to see more great projects dedicated to the master of the macabre.
-Wy

An InLinkz Link-up