Tim Holtz 12 Tags of 2015 – October

Hello!  I love Fall – it’s my favorite season.  I love the cooler temps, beautiful colors, Halloween decorations…  When I saw the tutorial for the October tag, I thought it would be fun to buy one of the new dimensional Halloween dies, but which one??  

My favorite “monsters” have always been Frankenstein, Wolf Man and Dracula, in that order.  I never cared for Zombies and still don’t, but I won’t be making any cards for myself and decided to go with the Zombie so I could make cards for my two adult children who just love “The Walking Dead” tv show.  I had to order the die since it’s hard to find the new TH Halloween products in stock around here.  I had decided early on to make a girl Zombie, but decided to save that for my daughter’s card.  Still, I wanted to do something different…I finally decided that a dog would make a fun Zombie!

When I got started, my dog looked like this (isn’t he handsome!):

But after turning him into a Zombie, he looks like this:

With the exception of the dog ears, every piece on the dog was from the die set, just cut to whatever shape I needed. Since I didn’t want the “guide lines” to show after cutting, I used the opposite side to decorate.  I thought the Zombie’s ears were perfect for the dog’s jowls.  For his nose, I trimmed off the bridge and then cut the nostrils and put it on top of another nose to make it longer and add some dimension.  

Even though the dog doesn’t really have eyebrows, if you look at the “before” photo you can see the thicker clumps of fur above the eyes that are kind of like eyebrows and I just cut two of the weird shapes from the dies for that.  I decided to give him bloodshot eyes and liked how the crescent shape looked on the left eye.  I cut some of the teeth to add fangs and put some “blood” on them.  I used a dog collar from Jolee’s Boutique “Guard Dog” set that I had on hand.  

The TH Halloween adornments were sold out around here, so I used a Zombie charm which started out as gold.  I used Inka Gold Platinum and Ranger Alcohol Ink in Mushroom to re-color him and then used the Picket Fence Distress  paint.  I also used Picket Fence on the word band and 2 black brads.  I had Halloween ribbon on hand and distressed it with black soot distress ink.  My background paper was from the TH Idea-ology Seasonal Paper Stash, and I used the splatter stencil with Black Soot distress ink.

It was a fun project and I look forward to making a boy and girl Zombie for my kids’ Halloween cards.  

For clarification, the Rottie pictured is not my dog, but a pic I found online, although I think I was inspired by an almost identical Rottie next door 🙂

Here’s my Zombie before placing him on the tag:

The distress ink colors I used were Hickory smoke, Black Soot, Rusty Hinge, Tea Dye, Fired Brick and Barn Door.

I have since completed my son and daughter’s cards, and wanted to share:

Please feel free to leave comments, and thanks for looking!