Get Ready For Halloween!

Get ready for Halloween! In my opinion it is the best holiday of the year. The colors, the smells of spices and cooler air, the rustling of leaves ablaze in beautiful colors and of course black cats, yes Halloween holds a special place in my heart, it is a time for remembering those that have passed on and the Earth begins to sleep. The best part? Scaring the crap out of the kids that come to the door for candy (and a few adults too). You have to earn the candy around here. 

I love designing for Halloween. Green and orange happen to be two of my favorite colors. I love the folklore surrounding some of the icons of the holiday and I have found that people who love Halloween are pretty passionate about it just as much as I am. It is the one day I truly enjoy.



Click the picture to see some of my designs, everything form Halloween Invitations to Trick Or Treat Bags

All of my designs are original, drawn by hand or rendered in Illustrator, are fully customizable and top quality. All designs can be made as Halloween or Samhain by simply changing the verbiage. If assistance is needed feel free to contact me via my shop contact form and I will be glad to help. 



Another New Halloween Design

Halloween Paisley Invitation Postcard

In my quest to learn something new I came upon this tutorial and thought I might give it a try. I like paisley and I LOVE Samhain so I though why not combine the two? I have to say the tutorial is very easy to follow and if you are learning Illustrator or want to learn something new this is a great site.

The paisley design I came up with (a small portion is shown above) involved two of my earlier designs, you may notice the skull and the spider has appeared before plus a new appearance by a bat. I chose citrus colors against black with touches of white. I think it worked well It wasn't hard to do but it was very time consuming. Perhaps it was because I didn't have a plan in my head, I just went along throwing things together, some worked some didn't. Along with the paisley design I made three seals to go along and compliment everything. While these show up in the final paisley they also stand alone.

Halloween Paisley Spider Sticker

Halloween Paisley Skull Magnet

Halloween Paisley Bat Button

Pumkins With Star-Shaped Freckles

Starry Night Pumpkins Invitation Postcard

Starry Night Pumpkins Invitation Card

Here is another twist on my pumkin design. This time I added some stars for freckles and a matching plaid-like background. I spent most of the day catching my Greeting Card Universe store up to speed. I have fallen a little bit behind. Most of the new designs will be up as soon as they are approved, usually around 2-4 days. Visit my store for a coupon code on 10 or more cards and get a head start on the holiday season or visit Zazzle for the complete line of Starry Night Pumpkins

Starry Night Pumpkins Tie

Starry Night Pumpkins Magnet

Starry Night Pumpkins Mug

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Bats In The Belfry

I Drive My * Batty Onesie

*insert any name instead of Mom

I seem to be on a Halloween kick this week which is ok by me. Bats In The Belfry started out as a little doodle I made in Illustrator. I began with a circle for the head and two for each eye, triangles for the teeth and a freehand smile. For the ears I used a triangle and applied "pucker and bloat" to give them a more interesting effect. I drew the left wing freehand then copied it and pasted it in place. For the top wing layer I also added "pucker and bloat". Grouping the two wings together, copying and pasting in place I reverted the new set of wings and placed them on the right side of the body.

The great thing about this design is that I made it so YOU can change the background color to anything you like. It is very simple with Zazzle's online design tool. All you need to do is hit the "customize button" next to any product and select colors and background. A preset palette will pop up but you can use a hexdecimal code to make any color you want. Go ahead, give it a try even if it is only for fun!

Some color samples of Bats In The Belfry:

Bats In The Belfry Bag	Bats In The Belfry Profile Card	Bats In The Belfry Tie
Bats In The Belfry Table Tent	Bats In The Belfry Apron	Bats In The Belfry Card

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New Halloween Design

Halloween Stripes Trick Or Treat Photo Bag

Well I had fun today! I decided to rely on my good old standby when I am dry for designs and that is Halloween and Samhain. I absolutely love Halloween/Samhain. I love the colors, the smells and scaring the trick or treaters and their parents when they come to my door. (You have to work for your candy here) and most of all remembering loved ones that have passed from this world.

To begin the design I started out in Illustrator and made a striped background of orange, green, black and purple. I opened it up in Photoshop and though I am not a big fan of filters I started to play around with them. First I added some "Noise", then I used "Sprayed Strokes" and added a "Burlap" texture to it. This added some interest from just plain old stripes.

Still something was missing so I went back into Illustrator and drew a simple little spider. I started with an oval, drew each of the legs on the left side, copied the legs and pasted in place then reflected the new set of legs and placed them on the right side of the spiders body. Then it was simple ovals for the eyes and a string to hang from. I placed him against the background but one big spider got quite lost so I shrunk him down and duplicated him until he ran along the green stripes of my background.

Liking where I was heading with this I opened Illustrator and drew three ovals, one a bit larger than the other two. This formed the Jack O'Lantern's body. I freehand drew the stem and mouth with help from the swirl tool for the ends and added triangles for the eyes and nose. I then added him to my background in Photoshop as I did the spider.

For the witch hat I took the stem from the pumpkin, added a few anchor points and disstorted it a little bit. I put an oval along the bottom and added some stars using the "Shapes" tool. It was then ready to add to the background.

To add to the designs I could make on Zazzle I repeated the process with the filters for a green, a purple and an orange background. I also saved copies of each drawing. I uploaded all of them into zazzle and well, you can see for yourself the designs that came about. Also you might want to take advantage of the back to school sale on bags. I have a few trick or treat bags for sale, some of which you can add your own phtots to.

I hope you like the new design, I have another idea I may work on tomorrow, Until then, enjoy!

Party Invitation

Photo Magnet

Table Tent

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Skull And Crossbones

Skull And Crossbone T-Shirt

Apparently my site host was having difficulties today and my site has been down resulting in a whole lot of broken image links in my stores. After spending a good chunk of the day transferring my images to Photobucket I managed to get a new design up for you.

Originally this skull and crossbones was hand drawn in ink but it just didn't seem right so I scanned it into Illustrator and redrew it there. This enabled me to easily duplicate it for a background using a custom made swatch out of my skull. It also gave me an easy way to reverse the image and perhaps at a later time add some color.

There are four current versions of the skull and crossbone availabe right now and tomorrow time permitting I am going to go back into Zazzle and seperate the different styles. Normally I like to do all versions by product so it is easy for you to compare but this time some ideas came in the middle of designing. I would have had the designs seperated right away but I had to spend that time on fixing broken links.

As of right now my site has the message "The Web site you are visiting is temporarily unavailable due to urgent maintenance work. If you have any questions regarding this Web site, please contact technical support" I can tell you in all honesty that it is not on my end and hopefully they get it up and running soon. The funny thing is that their main website is perfectly fine. I am however very sorry if it interfered with anything you were trying to see.

Other styles:

Skull Button

Skull Magnet

Skull T-Shirt

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Halloween, Samhain Already?

By The Light Of The Moon Card

By The Light Of The Moon Card

Well anyone that knows me knows that Samhain and Autumn is my favorite time of the year. I love the colors, the smells and the weather in the Northeast USA. There is simply nothing like it. Samhain is always on my mind, in fact my kitchen is forever decorated in pumpkins, black cats and skeletons even for the other Solstice holidays. Well it is not unusual to see a Samhain/Halloween design come out in the middle of the summer for me (even though summer consists of rain almost everyday here)

I did this design in two versions. The first is done with tiny little dots like my Dual Personality design. The second is in color as you see above and below. This design just kind of popped right out of my head with no thought, the pencil just took hold and took over. This doesn't happen often but I like when it does. I haven't used my watercolors in a while so it was nice to pick up a brush again. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it come to life.

Trick Or Treat Bag

By The Light Of The Moon T-Shirt

Click to see all of By The Light Of The Moon items

Black and White Version - Color Version



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