The Ghosts in the Machine

Hello and welcome, everyone - and an especially big welcome to the newest followers... it's lovely to have you with us.

You've arrived just in time for the monthly Artistic Outpost bloghop, and our theme this month - to get you in the mood a little early - is Halloween.

Do hop around to see what my amazing fellow designers have been up to.  Here's the full itinerary:

Gerrie Johnnic, Lisa Somerville, Suzanne Czosek, Tracy Evans

Linda Coughlin, Alison Bomber, Terry Horrall, Kate Yetter

Artistic Outpost has some delicious Halloween sets, but it so happens that I don't own any of them (yet!), so I got creative with some of my other AO stamps to create my ghostly tag.

To be honest, I've always found the little girl from the Kudzu Kafe set more than slightly unnerving, so she was my first choice.  

And I figured, well, if one of her is unnerving, how spooky would several of her all at once be?!

I started by sticking a book page to a tag, and then used Linda's technique of stripping away some of the text using masking tape, so that it would be even more distressed and shabby.

Then I gave the whole thing a rough coat of gesso so that the stamping would show up better.

I stamped the little girl in black Archival, and then stamped her again on another piece of paper so that I could cut a mask to use.

I layered up several versions of her, using second and third generation stampings to get varying ghostly transparencies.

I played with Distress Stains and a water brush to tint the main figure.  

Those in the background got a touch of colour too, but again, in paler and paler variations.

The little phrase was hovering in my mind - I've Googled it, and it doesn't seem to exist as a quote, so I suppose I must have cooked it up myself... 

There's something in it about those internal voices, or the other versions of ourselves that hover in and out of view at various points in our lives, haunting us with the possibility of other life choices we might have made, or might still make.  

The larger tag behind has actually been sitting around since April - it was one of my experiments with the Metallic Distress Paint background for Tim's tag that month.  It wasn't quite right for my tag at the time, but I still quite liked it, with all those swirls of Pewter shimmer.












Since I was working with spooky blues, it suddenly became clear that maybe its time had come.  I added some text stamping using the book text from the Bluebird set, so that it would match up with the book page background of the smaller tag.

And having added text to make the large tag more like the small one, I then added some blue inking and some Aged Silver Frantage to the small tag to make it more like the big one... 

The Frantage is sort of like internal ectoplasm, maybe?!

The cogs and gears arrived because the other words running around my head were "the ghost in the machine".

It's a phrase used in philosophy to question the notion that in some way our mind and body operate separately - as though the mind were somehow a separate entity trying to tell the body (machine) what to do, and not perhaps always with the body's best interests at heart.

With all my internal ghosts, it seemed right to add some machinery for them to operate.

A little topper of broad white paper ribbon and satiny grey ribbon tied together with some of the Idea-ology paper string is the finishing touch.

So there's my slightly off-beat, philosophical Halloween tag... Do go and have a look what my team-mates have been up to - I promise you won't regret it.  If you get lost along the way, you'll find all the details here.

For now, thank you so much for taking the time to stop by, and I'll see you soon somewhere out there in Craftyblogland.

The past is a ghost, the future a dream and all we ever have is now.

Bill Cosby

She walked with a ghost of herself, one full of potential and possibility. One who was fearless. Where had that girl gone?

From Vision in White, by Nora Roberts