September ATC

The title I gave this month's ATCs is "Starry Nights".

As I was cutting down the poppies in my garden and collecting the seeds from the pods, I noticed how the "lid" on each pod was star-shaped, Interestingly, the number of "rays" on each lid was not the same, even though they all came from the same type of Oriental Poppy. The lids from the Icelandic Poppy are altogether different: much smaller and many more rays.

After all the pods were collected and emptied, I removed the lids and painted them silvery gold. Then I glued them to a piece of ATC-sized black paper and drew a line with a gold jellyroll pen to indicate the horizon and to add some more faraway stars. Finally, the black cards were glued back-to-back with a recycled watercolor painting that I had cut into ATC size pieces. My name, the date and the title were hand-written on the back of the finished ATC.

August ATC

This months Artist Trading Cards were inspired by photographs I took of the country roads in my area. I found the perspectives fascinating. Here is one example of a crossroad near Dalkeith:


My cards were all made in the vertical format using collage technique.

July ATCs

This month I was inspired to use the "rubbing" technique to create my miniature artworks.

We all know this method from our school art classes: place a piece of parchment paper over a textured surface and lightly pass your pencil over the paper in a windshield wiper motion. The texture is captured on the surface of the paper. This is a handy method to copy engravings that cannot be moved or are not suitable for photography (gravestones, wall carvings, embossed texts).

The design was borrowed from classical still life paintings. I made a sketch of the shapes on my ATC sized parchment paper, then went around the house looking for different textures to use for each shape: a cardboard book cover, a brass plate from Morocco, a tablecloth, etc.. Using different colored pencils, I filled out each shape.

From the top:
Martha Alf: Pears Series 11 #7, 1978
Paul Cezanne: Still Life with a Basket, 1888 (used only the top right corner).
Georges Braque: Still Life with Fruit and Stringed Instrument, 1938
Frida Kahlo: Still Life with Parrot 1951 (without the parrot)

Inkblot Landscapes

Here are my ATC cards for this month. We trade today at 2:15 p.m. in Dunvegan, Ontario......so they are fresh from the artist's oven. Which card would you pick?

Method: I dropped some orange, blue and black ink onto one long side of an ATC-sized piece of 140 lb. watercolor paper. Then, I folded the paper in half, lengthwise. Presto! When I turned the card so that the fold was horizontal, there was my inspiration for a landscape reflected in the water. With a few dashes of colored pencil, markers and my favorite reflecting acrylic paint, my landscapes were complete. I glued the mini-artworks onto ATC-sized pieces of sketching paper, cut from a drawing I wanted to recycle.

My inspiration for these ATCs came from the famous Rorschach Test inkblot. Psychoanalysts used certain inkblots in determining unconscious associations. I only saw landscapes this time..............

August ATCs

This month, our ATC group has become integrated with a Wood Fair being held in the community center where we usually trade. For the occasion, we were given a theme for our cards: wood , of course! I cut a sheet of wood veneer, used to make "floating floors", into card size and glued them to a matboard backing. I went to work with my wood-burning tool to make a frame, a different one for each featured tree.

Since I had recently read "The Soul's Code" by James Hillman, I was inspired to see the seed produced by a tree as a capsule of it's future possibilities. Luckily, I had some rubber stamps of an oak, pine and spruce tree to use for the "genius" image. Then I got out my felt pens to draw the fruit of each tree. The final touch was a background, using my trusty liquid acrylics.

End of August and getting cooler already. On the way to work at 3 p.m. I have my AC on at 19 degrees and on the way home at midnight, I turn on the heater! It's already dark at 8 p.m. when I look out the window of the cafeteria. That's Nature.

July ATCs

This month I decided to use the matte medium transfer method to take images out of a magazine and re-design them into ATCs.

The method is this: choose an image and brush on a layer of acrylic matte medium. Let it dry well and apply another layer. I did about 20 layers until I was satisfied that it was really solid.
Step 2: Place the image in a bowl of water and wait a few minutes until the paper is well soaked. Then rub the paper away. The ink of the image will be imbeded in the medium....in mirror form. That is why this method doesn't work well for text transfers!
Step 3: Turn the image ink side up and glue it onto your ATC card with some acrylic medium. Now add color, lines and words with paint or pens to integrate the image is into your artwork.
p.s. I used the rubbed off paper to make a little "papier mache" bowl, by spreading the paper mush thinly over an upside down wire sieve. When it was dry, I cut the edge smoothly and painted it with acrylic paints.

The magazine I chose for this project was a 1980 edition of "Art-das Kunstmagazin" I had stashed away in my barn. I gave this project the title "woman Series, 1-13". Here you see 6 of them.

June ATCs

This month we are having a special ATC meeting in Dunvegan: our "Christmas bash" has been moved to the middle of summer. We will meet as usual to trade cards and then stay on to share in a potluck buffet, scan over our ATC collections and check out the Swap Table. Each of us brings 3 things of quality that we wish to give away and put it on the Swap Table. Then we help ourselves to any object we would like to keep. Even those who don't bring anything can take whatever they like!

I'm in the middle of my one week vacation and I decided to sit down with my trusty 20-year old Pfaff sewing machine to repair some clothes. In the back of my mind, I was pondering what I would do for ATCs this month. After finishing my mending, I took one of my empty cards and tried out one of the 300 patterns that the machine can sew automatically. I played around with variations on the length and width of the stitches and different colors of thread. Once I had my 11 cards (9 to trade, 1 for Reto and 1 to keep), I took out my colored pencils and put my embroidery into a setting. Then I went over it all with Gloss Medium and added leftover snippets of the threads I had used.

That is how my "Pfaff Art Cards" were made!

ATCs

My Artist Trading Cards for this month were inspired by the challenge set by Ronna in the ATCQuarterly. She asked for a card inspired by the theme of "Dollars and Sense". I have an old wallet with currency from the countries I have visited and decided to sacrifice the paper money for this project. Does it make sense to cut up money? If you are an ATC artist, yes!

I mixed pieces of bills from Hungary and Bali with Canada Tire money, newsprint from a local oriental daily paper and bits of gold paper to represent the real thing. When all the pieces were layered onto my ATC-sized cardstock with Mod Podge and then completely dried, I punched in some holes. Then the collage was glued onto another card of copper cardboard, so that the copper peeked through and looked like "cents" (pennies). It was a great way to spend this wintery afternoon.

I look forward to the trade this Saturday in Dunvegan, as always, but this month is special. We will stay on after the trade for a party, sharing some finger food and bubbly. This is a great tradition and we get inspiration from opening up our collections for review.

Notan

Yesterday I drove to Dunvegan for a meeting of the Artist Trading Cards group. We get together every last Saturday of the month to trade our original art cards with our peers. We can even trade with people who aren't there! Ronna brings in cards made by artists who send them to her by snail mail. We add our own card to the collection and then help ourselves to the one we like.

I made cards that had a haiku written on a piece of hand-painted paper. Each card had a layer of transparent embossed paper covering the haiku, making it even more Zen. My Haiku was:
In Dunvegan we
trade miniature artworks
one-for-one, for free.

This weekend was dedicated to doing what I love to do, so I sat down and made a series of ATCs for November. They are inspired by the concept of Notan, which I recently came across while Googling sacred sciences. Notan means "light/dark harmony" in Japanese. It is a concept that helps to design harmonious light and dark values in your painting. The idea is similiar to the Yin/Yang symbol: keeping light and dark in balance is the essence of harmony.

I invite you to try this out. Take a piece of 1" square white paper and cut out shapes. Use what is left of the square and all the pieces you cut out to make a design on a black or dark art card. The challenge is greater when you increase the size of your square to 2" ( like my cards # 5 and #6).