Thank you so much for following each week of the progress of my drawings for Mab Graves' Drawlloween Club Challenge! I can hardly believe that the month is very nearly done! But as usual, I have lots of other projects to work on, so I'm ready to move on, but pretty proud of myself that I got through the whole month!!
I hope no one will be disappointed if I postpone my final wrap-up until tomorrow and then it will include all of last week as well as my final drawing for tomorrow.
As a bit of teaser, here is a detail from the prompt "Alien" that I did!
I hope to see you here tomorrow for my final post of drawings for The Month of Drawlloween!
Hello and Happy Sunday Again to you, My Dear Friends!
Welcome to the third week of catching up with my drawings for Mab Graves' Drawlloween Club.
It's week three of the Drawlloween Club Challenge and I'm still keeping up and still having fun!
Still on the topic of inspiration, I have a lot of songs I love to listen to to help me get in the spooky mood when decorating or creating art during this extra-fun and extra-inspiring time of the year! Here are a few of my favorite tunes of madness and menace:
Albums:
Bat for Lashes - Fur and Gold and Two Suns
Cocteau Twins - The Pink Opaque and Treasure
The Cure - Bloodflowers
Depeche Mode - Black Celebration and Violator
Songs:
Bauhaus - Bela Lugosi's Dead
The Church - Violet Town
Cocteau Twins - Sugar Hiccup and From the Flagstones
The Cure - All Cats are Grey
Everything But the Girl - Tempermental (Pull Timewarp Remix)
Gene Loves Jezabel - Influenza (Relapse)
Joy Division - Candidate
Peter Murphy - All Night Long and Cuts You Up
Nouvelle Vague - Bela Lugosi's Dead (cover)
Rocky Horror Picture Show Soundtrack - Science Fiction Double Feature
The Specials UK - Ghost Town
Tones on Tail - Twist
Tricky - Love Cats (cover)
(For my fans of the blog who are not fans of Halloween, if you have not heard The Cocteau Twins, I would encourage you to do so. There are some songs which sound a bit dark, but many, such as Sugar Hiccup, are swirling confections of sound that are just lovely and fun. Everyone I have ever played the music of this band for who has not heard them before has a different way of describing them! Give them a listen if you have not!)
And here's something fun that Mr. V found that made me laugh!
Meanwhile, here are my drawings for this week:
(As always, click images to see them larger.)
To see what I have written about each piece, please check out my Instagram feed.
And please check back next week for the final pieces in the Drawlloween Club Challenge!
Hello and Happy Sunday Again to you, My Dear Friends!
Welcome to the second week of catching up with my drawings for Mab Graves' Drawlloween Club.
As I wrote in my last post her at The Tearoom Blog, I'm doing her challenge by making a drawing based on her prompt for each day of the month! Whew! I haven't drawn this much in a long, long time, but I'm still having fun!
When you are creating, do you like to watch something on TV or listen to music, perhaps? This week, I'm including a list of the movies that I have been or plan to watch while working on my spooky drawings this month. Of course, because this is the Spookliest Month of the Year, we have our stacks of Halloween-themed movies and TV shows all lined up. Some of them are not strictly Halloween movies, but some just have a definite "creep factor". Here are some of them (in alphabetical order):
- 9
- Addams Family (boxed set of original series)
- Addams Family and Addams Family movies
- Attack the Block (actually set on Guy Faukes Day, but lots of scariness anyway!)
- Beauty and the Beast (original Jean Cocteau film)
- Beetlejuice
- City of Lost Children
- Corpse Bride
- Crimson Peak
- Delicatessen
- Fantastic Fear of Everything
- Frankenweenie (both the original and the animated versions)
- Hotel Splendide
- Hotel Transylvania
- Lost City
- Munsters
- Nightmare Before Christmas
- Only Lovers Left Alive
- Paranorman
- Penny Dreadful (we're watching all 3 seasons again, but I love season 1 the best!)
- Phantom Museums - The Short Films of The Quay Brothers
- Revenge of the Were-Rabbit
- Rocky Horror Picture Show
- Shadow of the Vampire
- Shawn of the Dead
- Sleepy Hollow
- Super 8
- What We Do In the Shadows
And, here are my drawings for the week!
(As always, click images to see them larger.)
To see what I have written about each piece, please check out my Instagram feed.
And please check back next week when I post my favorite musical inspirations when I'm working and my Drawlloween creations for the week!!
Hello to you, Dear Friends and Welcome to The Spookliest Month of the Year!
Some of my blogging friends celebrate Halloween and some do not. For those who do, I hope you will find yourself suitably spookily inspired! And for those who don't I would still encourage you to at least read the interview I've linked below. I just love a lot of what Mab Graves had to say there about inspiration and the origins of creativity!
This year is the first year I have decided to do something a bit different with my October, creatively. This month, I am participating in Mab Graves' Drawlloween Club!
Mab provides us with the prompt for each day's drawing! So many fun Halloween topics to draw! She's such an inspiration! I've followed her on Etsy for a long time and now I follow her on Twitter and Instagram as well.
Here's a link to a great interview with Mab in Beautiful Bizarre Magazine from May of this year (very inspirational)!
And in my on-going quest to actually use all of the beautiful things I have managed to accumulate in my world, I am using a very special notebook for my Drawlloween drawings! This notebook is special to me for a few different reasons. First of all, it was a gift to me from a shop owner where Mr. V and I had shopped a couple of times. We had bought quite a few cards from him and other items and got to chat with him. On one of our visits, he gave me this notebook! So super sweet! The other thing that makes it special is that this shop was located on the rue Dauphine in Paris, just up the street from our hotel when we visited there in 2008! But the other thing that makes it special is that this is when I discovered the work of another great artist who continues to inspire me: Nicoletta Ceccoli! It is her illustrations which decorate this wonderful notebook I was given:
And so, I'll be doing a weekly blog post for the month of October, showing the drawings I have done for the Drawlloween Club challenge. I really haven't drawn everyday since art class in high school, but on the whole, I'm pretty happy with how things have turned out and I'm having lots of fun. Here's the first nine days of work:
(As always, click to see the images larger.)
Please check back again next week for what I've done for the week or keep up day by day by going to my Twitter or Instagram feeds!
Click her picture to read a tribute to her great inspirational influence on my life.
Donate to The Gossamer Tearoom
If you enjoy what I do here, won't you please consider buying me a coffee? Thank you so much! Donations to my Ko-fi account go to purchasing art and vintage supplies for my art projects.
The Gossamer Tearoom can also be found on Pinterest...
...and on Twitter...
...and now on Instagram as well!
Please take a look at my Etsy shop Velvet Revived!
Digital collage sheets, printable invitations and other printable projects, made from vintage images and creativity
Click the banners above and below to visit my Etsy shops! (And please feel free to post these banners on your blog!)
The Gossamer Tearoom Shop....
After you are finished sipping your last drop of tea and nibbling your last bite of cake, I do hope you will click the items below to visit The Gossamer Tearoom Gift Shop!
Welcome to The Gossamer Tearoom, a Tearoom of the Imagination...Please join me here to relax and enjoy fun discoveries I have made or new creations I am working on! I regularly host imaginary teas where I select teas and pastries that have enticed me. I'm interested in food, art, writing, selling vintage items. This is a place which celebrates my light side and my dark side too. A little bit of creepy has never hurt anyone!
Close your eyes and imagine yourself in an English garden by moonlight or a French tea salon under a wedding cake ceiling and opulent chandelier. This imaginary place is a quiet place of peace, of art, indulgence in teas of our own imaginings, of music, of light and of dark. Please enjoy your visit here!