Witches' Brew for World Card Making Day

	Oct 2nd is World Card Making Day and soon it will be Halloween so what better way to celebrate than to have some witches mix up a special treat!
I got this image a few weeks ago at a rubber stamp convention as unmounted rubber from a company called Rubber Cottage. It's a great way to buy stamps because you can usually get the unmounted rubber for about half the price (or less) of a fully mounted wood block, which means you can buy twice as much. You buy the cling foam (they sell it there) and put the back of your unmounted rubber image on the super sticky side and then cut it out with a good pair of scissors. The other side of the cling foam will stick to any acrylic block just like a clear stamp. You can also cut out the foam first, then stamp the cling side using Staz-on and then mount it.
Someone at the convention usually sells white plastic sheets you can stick the cling side to and organize them in a binder. This lets you have all the advantages of real vulcanized rubber in about the same space as clear stamps. Since I use this method to store them, I don't bother stamping the cling side since I won't be able to see it when I'm looking though them. Once you fill up a sheet, just ink all the images and stamp the sheet onto a piece of paper if you want a correctly flipped version of the image to look through.
I had wanted to do something a little fancier with the image but it was so large that I ended up just framing it with paper because I didn't want to go to a larger card size. The image itself was a witch to color. Before it's colored it looks like a giant mess of lines and it's difficult to follow which line is which. It was worth the effort in the end though.
Click the image above for the instruction sheet if you want more information on the colors used. For the fire, I didn't do normal Copic blending like you see on the dresses, faces and hats. Instead I just laid down flicks of red, then orange and then yellow while it was wet. The ink blended together down toward the yellow so it looks natural but I wanted to leave the random splashes of color to balance out the witches being so dark.