Andrea's Scraps

Posts Tagged ‘ATC’

Artist Trading Cards (ATC’s) are simple and totally fun pieces of art. You can start from a 2 1/2″ x 3 1/2″ piece of paper or a stamp a whole sheet then cut it to size, it’s really up to you. At first you may think that it’s really hard to work on that size, but once you get into it, it’s really addicting! You’ll find all sorts of stamped images that fit really well onto this size as you can see below.

Faerie Song Art Stamps is a great source for fantasy images! Check out my little Copic colored faeries! Patterned paper is DCWV.

I just can’t get enough of these! Here’s one for the ATC club that I belong to. The theme is “Butterflies and Bugs”. The background honeycomb is from Starving Artistamps, the bee from Stampin’ Up!, letter B from Leave Memories (no longer in biz) and “unique” from Faerie Song ArtStamps. How’s that for cross-company usage??! The inks are Tsukineko’s, one of my favs for sure. Thanks for looking!

Such wonderful pieces of art! They are too fun and great to use up scraps of paper and other material.

The Oasis ATC club (my local ATC club) had a recent meeting where we traded cards for 2 different themes: “Leather and Lace” and “Egyptian”. What super FUN themes! For leather and lace, I used the technique that I recently learned at PK Glitz. It’s so simple and yields a fantastic result. All you need is sticky paper, an open patterned piece of lace and glitter. Below is the result.

For the egyptian theme, I used 2 different egyptian stamps (background from Lasting Impressions with Panache and the other I can’t remember) that were heat embossed. I added some extra glitz for effect using a glue pen and some of PK Glitz’ tape – oh yea that stuff is KILLER COOL!

I was also lucky enough to be invited to join in on a Tim Holtz inspired nation-wide ATC swap. The theme was to use Adirondack Lights colors. I chose to also use Stampers Anonymous stamps and Tim’s Brushless Watercolor technique. I had to add some grungeboard that was painted with Cool Peri and coated with Crackle Accents. Here is the result:

I have an ATC Club meeting coming up, so I spent some creative time yesterday (the first in quite awhile!) to design and complete the 3 sets of ATC’s that I needed. We haven’t met since the end of October, so that’s why there are 3 sets due: November, December and January. If you can find or even start an ATC club in your area, do IT! It’s SO fun to create these wonderful 2 1/2″ x 3 1/2″ masterpieces! You can try new techniques, use those little or big stamps, texturize, colorize and use up those random embellishments or paper scraps you have around! Terrific stuff indeed!

Favorite Technique ATC: my favorite technique has got to be heat embossing. I absolutely LOVE IT! I tried something new here, heat embossing on wood veneer! I got these great samples to work with from the “wood veneer man” of Dowlen Wood & Paper Crafts in TX. Send them an email, Wood Veneer Man to find out more about it since I don’t believe they have a web site up yet. Anyway, heat embossing on wood is similar to regular paper, just make sure your heat tool is warmed up ahead of time. I found that the image was embossed better, with more detail, when I did this. The coloring was done with Sakura’s Glaze pens and the outlining with a Krylon Silver Leafing pen. The images are from Unity Stamps.

Winter Wonderland ATC: cardstock is the base and I used a Heidi Swapp mask to create a subtle snowflake background with irridescent white all-purpose ink (Tsukineko). A SU! stamp was used for the word “winter”. The snowflake is die cut from acetate then alcohol inked for contrast. Glossy Accents holds the snowflake to the ATC. A Doodlebug glitter center adds more texture. The edges are inked with Tsukineko’s VersaMagic Aegean Blue.

20th Century Art ATC: I used a little Cubism and Abstract here to create this simple yet fun ATC. The background is a mosaic stamp from Starving Artistamps, heat embossed and colored with markers (be sure to check out my discount code on the right side bar for shopping!). The “art” image is from Ma Vinci and heat embossed in detail gold and popped on foam squares.

If you ever travel abroad or like the international flair on your projects, definitely get some clear stamps from Dove of the East. Beautiful in their detail and perfect for cards and embellishments, these stamps bring China, Japan, India and Russia right to you! Check out the ScrapFriends review and other great projects using the images.

The first is an ATC with the elephant debossed into embossing powder. The other stamps on the background are also from the India Journey set.

This card uses images from the Japan Journey set. So lovely!

I think this is my favorite! The clock kit is from Kaiser and the paper plus stamps are from Dove of the East, China Journey. I really love how it looks aged, all keeping with the great picture a fellow coworker took while in China last year. Pretty amazing!