More Photos from My Halloween Journal

 As always, I am running behind.  I wanted to post some more pictures from my handmade Halloween Journal.   I painted pictures from memory and also tried my hand at creating pictures generated from some journaling prompts from various websites.  I generally prefer making sculptures in paper mâché, but I am trying to expand my horizons by making paintings.

This is a picture of Zoltar the Magnificent, an animatronic fortune telling machine that was at Ocean View Amusement Park.  I went there often as a child.  You inserted your money, and that started the fortune telling process.  The figure would move its hand and point to a card.  Then a printed fortune would pop out of a slot.  I wanted the painting to reflect late at night when a fog was rolling in.  The bright lights of the midway glowed in the fog. Fog rolling in off the ocean has stuck in my memory from when I was a child.  

This picture was created from one of the prompts for Halloween journaling.  Some mushrooms are bioluminescent.  They glow in the dark.  The type of mushrooms I painted are not one of the types that glow in the dark, but it made for a whimsical picture.  I liked the clouds and the depiction of the Milky Way.  The soft effect of the picture was created by using colored pencil and paint pastels. 

Another journaling suggestion was to paint autumn leaves.  I painted this picture of a dogwood tree that is in my front yard.  This is the view outside of my living room window.  Sometimes when I look at this photo it seems garishly bright, but it actually is the color of crimson that the tree turns in the fall.  

Despite feeling I am running a race; I am still trying to work on current projects.  I will be posting on that as soon as I get some pictures.  In the meantime, I will make a few more posts of the paintings in my Halloween Journal.  It was a lot of work to make so many paintings on a deadline, but I am glad that I stuck to it.  Check back next week for some more photos of the journaling project.

Recent Projects - Halloween Journal

 It has been a while since I posted any pictures of my projects.  I have mentioned before that more and more I have to make a choice between blogging about my projects or having time to work on my projects.  I am posting some of the pictures of things that I have been working on since I finished my owl project.

Journal Cover

One of my friends is very interested in making journals.  She saw a Halloween Journal challenge online.  She asked if I wanted to do one as a challenge between her and myself and anyone else that we knew locally that might be interested.  What we found was that most of our friends had neither interest, inclination, nor time to put into making a journal.   Not deterred, my friend and I continued on with the project.   It appears that we did not have the time either, as neither of us was able to complete the journal until December.  I hate working on something that has a deadline.  Stressing over getting something done on time takes a lot of the joy out of a project.  I am doing artwork to alleviate stress not to add more to it.

We actually started Dec. 2023

I have been trying to learn how to paint pictures.  I decided that I would try to paint the pictures for my Halloween Journal.  It turns out that I am horrible at painting.  But, if I wanted to learn how to paint, I need to start somewhere.  So, I wanted to show some of the pictures that came out at least not horrible.  Some of the pictures in the journal will never be shown though.

To keep the post from being too long, I will only post a few pictures at a time.  

We used some suggestions for the themes from various sources online: birds, cats, bats, haunted houses and so on. 

I added a little comment on each one to give some indication as to what I was thinking when I made the picture.  I wrote in cursive because I thought it might make it look creepier, especially to a younger generation that is not used to reading it.

The raven was a pen and ink drawing.  The abandoned (haunted) house and the crystal ball pictures were done in acrylics.  Some of the pictures I will post over the next couple of posts are painted with watercolor, pastels, and colored pencil.  I wanted to try a variety of mediums to see which one I liked best.  I wanted this journal to be play time.

It is a little scary to put my paintings on display.  If nothing else, I hope that it will encourage others to try something new.