During the past few years I have made very elaborate Halloween costumes for our three dogs. In 2019, our groomer wanted to turn Topper into a unicorn. She decorated Daisy as a rainbow, and I resurrected my rainbow costume I had made nearly 40 years ago.
In 2020 we adopted our third dog, Bear, and I was inspired to turn the dogs (and willing family participants) into Care Bears. My groomer also helped by painting the dogs and making the headpieces.
In 2021 I continued the Bear theme, this time recreating Winnie the Pooh (our nickname for Bear is actually Pooh Bear). I used a combination of store bought and hand made costumes. As you can see, no one (but me) looked too happy in costumes.
Halloween 2019 was a rain-out and there were no trick-or-treaters in 2020 and 2021 due to the Pandemic. Furthermore, most of the neighborhood kids have moved out or left for college. So this year, I decided to skip the hassle of dressing the dogs and posing for pictures by creating virtual costumes to post on Instagram, Facebook, etc.
Over the summer I had completed an online Photoshop class offered by ed2go.com through my local community college. I basically wanted to learn how to make composites for my blog, but the 12-lesson course was very comprehensive and I enjoyed learning a variety of techniques, such as digital painting and photo restoration. I particularly enjoyed digital painting, so I thought I would incorporate this technique into my Halloween costume design.
Our final assignment was to create a portfolio with a sampling of the projects we completed during the class, as well as any of our own work. My portfolio is available at https://behance.net/kingontrack.
During my online class, I learned about a website called Pixabay.com to search for free images (see note below). I searched “Halloween background” and downloaded the pumpkin image. I also searched on “haunted forest” for additional background ideas. Which background do you prefer?
For instructions click here.
1 thought on “Happy Halloween!”