12 Tags of 2014 – October

Well it’s October and time for another Tim tag….and it is truly scary because here in good ol’South Africa - Halloween is a non-event. 
Our kids dont trick or treat, I wear crazy outfits everyday and the only horrifying thing about the 31st of October every year is that we realize that Christmas is around the bend and we should have started saving earlier for that huge Christmas splurge. 
So to keep myself locally relevant – my big trick for this month is that I am going to pass on the all the Boo, pumpkins and Ghoulery , but treat you to my reinterpretation inspired by the October Tim Tag…..see what I am doing there huh with the trick and treat and all of that? I have kept the key design elements and techniques and adapted them to fit my needs.



Here below is my method of madness.
– the /ink/paint spatter. 


We dont have the distress spray stains in South Africa yet so I had to come up with a new plan – I soaked a regular paint brush in Distress Ink Refill Ink and used the Distress Spray Tool to “spray splotch” the ink onto the background.

- the texture paste & stamped, masked elements.





















I used the eye from the Stamper’s Anonymous Oddities Collection,a pastel gel pen to colour in the iris and the Victorian Velvet Pen to colour in skin.  You can’t really see it all that well in this picture but I used a dark purple metallic gel pen to give the eye some eyeliner too.  the  and the Eyechart stencil.  I felt like the stencilled paste needed a little more contrast against the hectic splotch background there so I rubbed some metallic tarnished brass Distress Stain on it, then I sprinkled some embossing powder on that and heat set.  Finally I took a black pen and outlined the embossed bits to create the illusion of a shadow.

- the pumpkin bit
I played around with the stamped eye image again and cut it out etc – but it looked well psycho, like a carved out eye on a ransom note or something. I hated that – yeah I am my own hater!  In the meantime I was experimenting with the bottle dies again.  I wanted to create a vintagey handblown glass looking bottle for some other project and I was spreading on Clear PVC Cement on a bottle acetate die-cut and loving the effect.  It suddenly dawned on me that I could frame the eye in the vintage bottle.  To create the blue glass effect – I squirted some alcohol ink on the craft sheet and using the waterbrush, I coloured the reverse side of the bottle die-cut.  I dripped some plain old alcohol into the coloured bits to give it more of a uneven effect like the way light catches old glass. I glossy accented on top of the dried PVC Cement bits.
- the boo part
 



















Those Alpha-tiles were not available yet here as well.  So my fix was to cut scrabble like tiles from board and stamp my sentiment.  I didn’t have a tiny numbers stamp-font so I wrote in the letter values for the scrabble tiles.




- the tinsel ,trinkets and the trim


I liked the look of the stripy tag hang on the original tag so I substituted the baker’s twine in for the tinsel bit.  See those trinkets there on Tim’s tags?  I thought it would be in-theme to substitute that with a rolled up eye-chart.  I had bought those tiny acrylic versions that Stamper’s Anonymous once put out and it had a tiny version of the eyechart stamp in one of those collections.  I did do Monocle thingie with the eye rub-on, and attached it to the top an all but it looked lame and too busy at that point, so I detached it and left the tag as it is.