As the days grow shorter and the weather gets colder, the shops start to fill up with Halloween related products. In the UK this is a relatively recent phenomenon – when I was a child, although we were aware of Halloween, it wasn’t much ‘celebrated’ as such – there were few parties, and no trick or treating to speak of. All the festivities were reserved more for Bonfire Night on the 5th November. For my Scottish husband though, trick and treating was very much a part of his childhood, so maybe it’s more of a Celtic thing in terms of origin? Who knows.

Anyway, the range of products now available is astonishing, kids love them, and they always provide some inspiration to produce some spooky artwork. Last year we created some Halloween Shadow Art, but this time I thought we’d use the scanner again to see what spooky artwork we could create on there.

So here are the results:

Baby-wipe Ghosts – created using dried baby-wipes, with a tin foil moon, and black paper as a background. Faces were drawn on with black pen afterwards. I wish I could say that this was my idea, but in fact I took it from a book entitled Splat! What’s That? - one of those creative books which I love, and has lots of objects and drawings for kids (or big kids!) to add to, interpret and complete.

Tangled Wool Spiders – The spiders were just created from lengths of black scrunched up knitting wool, while the web made use of the baby wipes again, but this time we pulled and tore the wipes to create a web effect. Legs were drawn on with felt-tips, and eyes with paint.

Spooky Landscape – One of the beauties of scanner art is the 3-dimensional layered effects you can achieve. The misty effect was achieved with tracing paper on the scanner glass, with dried, shredded baby wipes once again for the mist, (who knew they could be so versatile?) cut-out black paper for the building, and twigs, leaves, grasses etc. for the foreground. You can play around with this for ages if you have the patience!