My Own Little Haunted Houses

Awe yes! It's almost that time. The time for black, orange, skeletons, haunts, ghosts, graves and my lucky black cats. Halloween will soon be in the air and I am SO ready for it! Alpha Stamps has the best "treats" to play with and these Black Chipboard Haunted Houses (set of 4) are one of them. You can visit Alpha Stamps to get this months "Haunted House Kit". Better yet, you can join in on the Haunted House Swap! 

I just adore crows and ravens and would love to do an animal rescue and care for some of these magical and intelligent birds. They could stay with me in my studio and keep me company before we go out for some exercise. 

Something I like to do with my images, be it from a collage sheet (downloaded for multiple printing) or a stamped image is to give it dimension. Using two copies of the same image, I place one on top of the other using adhesive foam.  Sometimes I use 3 or 4 copies of an image to make certain parts of an image pop out even more. 

You can't see it as well in the photos, but in person the images seem more realistic. 

To make these crows I used the Raven on a Branch Rubber Stamp and the Angry Crow Rubber Stamp. 

Below, I used adhesive foam to make the fence pop out more.

I also use the foam to attach a second roof. 

Imagine all of the cool treasures in that place! Perfect spot for me to do some shopping. 

Above, you can see the black chipboard Haunted House before they have dimension or roofs. Creating a multi level house can be a bit intimidating at times. Figuring out where and how to add roofs, windows and doors is the challenge. I don't want my work to be "flat" and without that certain something that makes it pop. I want it to have different roof lines as well. I like to look at them and create in my mind, where I would want a roof line to be.

I will demonstrate using this house. Above, plain house. Below you can see that I created a covered porch by extending my roof line. I used the pattern in the Rare Oddities paper design to create shingles.

It reminds me of the house I grew up in, a Victorian. I hated it as a teen but would love to live there now! 

This is the back of the same house, creating different roof lines using paper. Of course you wouldn't want the excess paper from the other side showing, but this is a sample and I would create it so both sides showed only the papers for that side. 

I lay out the papers first, trim some, and add different items from the  Old Doors Collage Sheet, playing until my eye is pleased with what it sees. I liked the second story doors, but trimmed them down to fit as I needed them to. It's just art play. Sometimes it doesn't "come to me" right away and I have to step away for a little bit. But eventually it always works itself out. I added a different color of roof with the Moonlit 12x12 Paper Collection and trimmed down the Miniature Rusty Picket Fence fence to make it fit.

The use of different types of Black Dresden also help to distinguish where one roof ends and the other begins.

I am creating even more Haunted Houses for the Alpha Swaps Haunted House Swap. Are you going to play too? You should, it will be Hauntingly fun!

Haunted House Swap

Now hurry and get inside. The sun is starting to set and darkness will be here soon. And you know what the night brings.......