2011 Halloween Designs

Every single year since I was a young child Halloween has always been one of my favorite holidays. I have been online since 2008 promoting my artwork and writing and the moment July comes for some reason I get the Halloween Bug!!

Each year I will create certain Halloween Designs and so far they are each different and unique. The first year online I decided to create some Recipe Cards at Zazzle by creating designs with graphic arts. One of my favorites was a cauldron I created and added a Fairy Rose Cookie recipe inside it.

In 2009 and 2010 I started creating Fairy Witches and again picked one of the designs and added a recipe in the card. This year I am doing something completely different and using my photography and manipulating it in a couple different computer programs.

I started creating these designs late July early August and now that I believe I have a pretty good choice, I am beginning to think of my Christmas Designs which again is another one of my favorite holidays. Often I think my internal clock is off, but hay I am not going to fuss over it, considering it involves art, photography and my favorite holidays!

I opened a new Zazzle Gallery called: WhiteOak's Halloween if you are interested in seeing more of my new designs.

One weekend after my husband and I were through doing photography, we stopped at one of my favorite Halloween Places (Michaels Craft Store) to look at their Halloween stuff.

I will be the first one to admit, I am like a kid in a candy store when it comes to Halloween Stuff. It just so happens that Michael's was in the process of putting out their Halloween items and all I can say is WOW!

My idea this year was to create new Halloween Designs using my photography and adding special effects. I started with the Skulls because they are cool looking, spooky and have a somewhat of a goth feel to them. As I was looking at everything in Michael's my husband was going through all of the bins of skulls picking me out the best ones. I believe he did a great job picking these skulls, a couple even spook me a little!

Normally what I do is take a certain percentage of my money that I earn online and invest it in props and such for my photography and zazzle galleries. I will take the items (new and old) and set up different stages in my workroom and take a ton of photos!!

Once I have all of my photos that I want to take for the moment, I upload them to my computer and start to play with different effects. Some of the designs I will put a Halloween theme saying and some I don't. I usually always put a black border around the designs and add this irregular effect that gives the border some character.

Often I also use this effect called vignette and it adds this smokey black film around whatever part of the picture I want to highlight. Recently because of a good friends suggestion, I started to add different colors to the photos.

There are several free photo editing sites online. One that was shared with me is called: Picnik Photo Editing The photo "Purple Skull" was edited in Picnik, the border was placed there in a different program.

To be honest, to create any Halloween Design all you have to do is use your imagination and add a little unique creativity.