Well that took all day -- whew! Today I have been assembling my ATCs for the group trade tomorrow.
Just to recap: This month's theme is characters from children's literature. I chose The Mad Hatter and The Cheshire Cat. I love Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, but I also chose these images because they were ones I had once originally drawn for use on ceramic tiles and I thought I could re-size black and white versions, print them on watercolor paper and then paint them individually with watercolors.
I finished painting the cards last night and today I used little scrapbooking rivets to affix them to the cards that I wrapped with handmade paper.
I use Magic: the Gathering cards that I am not playing with as the base for my ATCs because they are the right size and they have rounded corners. I have been doing this since I first started making ATCs in the 90's. It is a great way to repurpose cards that would just be languishing in a box.
I also covered the backs of the cards with decorative papers, but I messed up and ended up covered them with a few sentences about the characters from the book that I printed out on decorative paper.
A few weeks ago when I first thought of doing this for the trade I printed out a bunch of the original images from that ceramic tile series and made little one inch stickers to give away with the ATCs...so people getting my cards could see the way the images looked before they were sized for the cards.
And now they are all ready to go!
Now all I need to do is gather up a whole bunch of Art-o-mat art to show as examples when I do my presentation to the group. I am going to do an overview of Art-o-mat and walk them through the submission process, including making a prototype.
This is only my second meeting of the ATC trading group, but I am having a blast making Artist Trading Cards again -- and trading in person with people! And hey -- I have a captive audience that wants to hear about Art-o-mat -- how cool is that?
