Halloween Haunted Happenings art market in Salem, Massachusetts, was coming up so Ty created a series of artworks to show there; most were lost to time but this one held on and has become popular, which is ironic because in Ty's mind, his attempt to create a spooky Halloween image had backfired. The concept was good: A witch searching for her black cat in the haunted woods, but the problem was that there was a lot of space left at the bottom of the artwork and when Ty can’t figure out what to draw, he draws an opossum. But now the opossum has dominated the artwork and the black cat is a secondary consideration. It's a normal stream-of-consciousness creative process and perfectly legitimate- and the artwork has been well-received but sometimes Ty is exasperated by how his spooky images always end up oddly adorable.
Ty glued and pressed this print to a hand-painted wooden craft board, then brushed on some expressive glossy brushstrokes with clear acrylic medium, sort of an acrylic paint without pigment. He then lacquered it to make it shiny. It’s got a nice weight to it and is a good compromise between a print and an original artwork.
