Love In Halloweentown – Art Journal Spread and Postcards

Hello friends,

Yesterday was not a good day in cat land, Mr G continues to be poorly and also un-cooperative – times like this I wish I could speak cat and then he would understand that I’m trying to help him.  Instead everything I do is met with hissing and growling and resistance.  Let me remind you that he is 7.5kg of solid muscle.  That’s 16.5lb of unhappy cat!   Since I had to keep an eye on him, I moved things downstairs and did some drawing last night.  It was quite soothing and also very productive.  That reminds me, wasn’t it nice the other day when facebook central was down for several hours?  I do remember the internet pre-Facebook and it got me wishing they were gone for good, as I still feel that they ruined the internet, but maybe they forgot to renew their domain name haha, I get the same message when I forget to renew mine.

But anyway firstly here is my desk as it was this morning, with the results of my productivity yesterday.  I haven’t been drawing much lately, so yesterday I did some as I said, and it resulted in this art journal page, and then as I was thinking about Halloween and also World Post Day on Saturday, I thought I would make some Halloween postcards to post to some friends, so I used my journal page as inspiration and ended up with seven postcards.  This is the reason people use stamps lol, this took me all night to do seven from scratch.  Imagine how quick that would have been with a stamp lol.

On my desk is the finished page and the seven postcards I made.  I used some watercolour postcards that come in a nice tin (I really wanted the tin!) and they are quite textured, but still turned out OK for drawing on.  Other things on my desk from left to right: eraser, assorted drawing pens, brushes, jar of dirty water and more brushes, little bowls of various stuff, my Dad’s wooden desk calendar, jewellery anvils, bulldog clips, Dr Who purse (matches the mask I made recently), some wooden owl buttons, a yin yang ceramic paint palette, date stamp and ink pad, an even bigger ceramic paint palette with a lid, another bowl full of assorted bulldog clips.

After I did all the planning for my page and knew where I wanted everything to go (Jack and Sally inside a heart) I was just going to paint the rest of the page green and be finished, but it was at this point that I had started on the postcards, and some of them (the Sally ones) have black cats on them so I wanted to add a black cat to the journal page too and I thought it would be nice if it was looking at Jack and Sally.  And that’s when I got my title too – Love in Halloweentown!

Pink is featuring quite strongly this month, I wonder why that is?  I seem to be drawn to the colour at the moment – I am actually wearing a very big pink scarf today that is a very similar colour to the pink I used inside the heart!  All the colouring is done with neocolours and paint pens and then the green background is a fluid acrylic colour.  After I wrote the words I decided to add little spiderwebs to the corners and a tiny spider.  At this point I had forgotten to add eyes to the spider and whiskers to the cat, but there was no time this morning as I had to go out and catch the mobile post office before it left.  I asked them if they had any special stamps but alas they did not so I had to make do with ordinary stamps.  The postage for these postcards + envelope was £1.70 each, for all countries since it was the lightest of weights.  Even though that is a standard price for that weight they didn’t have a £1.70 stamp so they had to give me three stamps for each one, a £1, £0.50 and a £0.20 so that will add some interest to the otherwise boring envelopes LOL.  I say that but I will probably (maybe) draw something on them to make them more interesting.

Here’s a better look at the postcards all together.  I still have to tweak them some more and add some small details like pupils in the cat eyes etc. The ones with Sally and the cat will go to the cat lovers and the ones with Jack will go to the non-cat lovers. These are just the international ones that I have to post.  I’ll probably make more of them later on for the ones I don’t have to post overseas since I don’t have to worry about them getting there on time.

Edited to add:  animation now available

When I was out today, (I had to return cat food I bought last week that he now can’t eat!) I did some grocery shopping and again, due to supply chain problems, there were bare shelves.  Six empty shelves where the pasta should have been, there was no grapefruit juice to be had, no wholemeal pitta bread, and most shocking of all – there were NO DREAMIES on the cat food shelf!!!!!  Stock due in on 14th October, that’s over a week away.  I’m not sure when Cat Snacks became a thing but they take up four shelves in the supermarket.  Cat snacks are not a priority item but those things are addictive, like crack for cats, so I’m now picturing lots of cats in Dreamies withdrawal and their owners quaking in fear lol.  The supermarket is still full of food btw, much more than we need, but it is strange to see empty shelves, something that has been happening on and off for the last 18 months now, and never happened prior.

Let me know what you think in the comments.   As always, thanks for reading!Ingredients
my handmade journal, watercolour paper, paint pens, PITT artist pens, neocolor II’s, black pen, pencil,  watercolour postcards

Challenges

Art Journal Journey – The Colours of October – October Challenge – my colours are pink, green and black

Country View Challenges – Autumnal Colours/Halloween – October Challenge – I choose Halloween this time

LeighSBDesigns – 31 Days of Halloween Hop+Challenge 2021 – Day 6

WOYWW – #644 – What’s on my desk (I’m number #21 in the linkup!)  Happy WOYWW!

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