Trick Or Treat

Hello friends,

Happy Halloween for the second time today!  I have finally finished page 31 for my October/Halloween journal today, and I have bound all the pages into a book which I will show you at the end of the post.  *** Flip through will be sometime next week***

I love Halloween, or old traditional Halloween the way it used to be, less commercial and plastic-y like most things. As far as I am concerned Halloween is a Scottish holiday, though most people seem to think it’s American. We invented the word and long before people were carving pumpkins, we were carving lanterns out of turnips (neeps) – try doing that, it’s hardcore trying to carve a turnip – it’s solid all the way through lol. And our dressing up was called “guising” and was supposed to keep children safe by blending in with any evil spirits that were wandering on All Hallow’s Eve, or Hall’een as it is called here. Children would knock on their neighbours doors and ask “Hauding Hall’een missus?” and then if they said yes, they would perform their party piece and get a treat or a gift which was supposed to ward off evil. Children’s parties/school parties would have games like dookin’ for apples (bobbing for apples) and there would be toffee apples and other treats.

My mum always made tablet and treacle toffee for Halloween, and sometimes toffee apples and treacle scones, it seems like a treacle time of year lol. Robert Burns wrote an excellent poem (a long one) about Halloween which you can read here.

today’s journal page . . .

Today’s spread is inspired by this gel print I did a few years ago and pasted into my journal to finally make use of it.  Also by something that I found in my stash today while looking for something else…

This page started off with these gel prints for the background.  It’s a pretty wild background and I really wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it but at least the colours were Autumnal!  I thought maybe the strip down the right side could turn into a tree maybe…

Then yesterday I remembered I had a bag of googly eyes and I thought it would be fun to put them all over the background.  I spent so much time looking for them with no success that I was about to give up on this page, but then while I was looking for the googly eyes, I found this little felted cat and pumpkin I made a few years ago to put on a bag.  It’s funny how something can come from nothing but that’s where the idea came from.  It was fate!

Before I added him to the page, I drew in my tree and creepy branches.  I wanted to keep some of the yellow colour from the gel print, so I used some browns to add some shading, instead of making it all black as I usually do.

So what is the story here?  Does it have to have a story, not really, but I think the expression in the cat’s eyes do tell one.

I’m going to say that the black cat has stolen a pumpkin from the Guardian of the Pumpkin Patch and is making his escape.  It’s up to you whether you think he is running towards the witches for safety or more trouble.  Is it trick or treat time?

the october journal . . .

I don’t usually make a monthly journal but this month I had enough pages to bind them all together into one book, so that’s what I did. There are a few posts on here explaining how I make them so I won’t go into detail again here. Once all the pages were together and I added my cover (old amazon box) I wanted to decorate it.

Since there are so many cats inside the pages of this journal and since it is Halloween today, it had to be a black cat!  This is how I left it last night after painting the cat and then the background.  Originally I painted the background purple but it was too dark so I had to paint over it with lime green.

I added more detail to the cover today.  This is how the book looks when it is opened flat, back cover on the left, front cover on the right.

And when it is closed…

And the the spine looks like this…

Hope you enjoyed the post and this month of Autumnal Halloween journal pages.  Let me know what you think in the comments.   As always, thanks for reading!Ingredients
my handmade journal, watercolour paper, gel prints, acrylic paint, paint pens, Pitt artist pens, white pen, Tim Holtz Halloween witches, felted black cat and pumpkin, Prima stickers,

Challenges

Art Journal Journey – The Colours of October – October is looking autumnal today 🙂

LeighSBDesigns – 31 Days of Halloween Hop+Challenge 2021 – Day31 (2) catchup

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