illustration friday: ghost

to view with mask down click here.

I carved this little ghost to use for ATCs for the A Haunted ATC Swap I'm hosting. The idea stemmed from a softie I designed (and am still working on) for the October theme for A Month of Softies.

I stamped onto vellum and then colored the backside of the image (a method picked up from Heather, the queen of hand colored block prints) with watercolor markers (for a more ghostly appearance). After everything was dry I mounted the ghostie girls to white cardstock printed with excerpts from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. As luck would have it, the little pumpkin head I carved for my stamped fat quarters was the perfect size to use as a mask for the ghost. Hooray for not having to carve a second pumpkin head a la one pissy, headless Hessian soldier! The mask is stamped on some heavy duty handmade paper. I used some cabling wire for the handle and sandwiched it between the mask and another piece of handmade paper. For the life of me, at one o'clock in the morning, I could not figure out any other way besides using a hot glue gun (gasp) to attach the mask to the ghost's hand. Although, in the end the hot glue gun actually ended up adding the benefit of a slight weight to the hand so the mask floats just above the face and not at a 45 degree angle like my mock-up did.