Artist Trading Cards: You Know You Want To

I participated in a thrilling Artist Trading Card exchange last week. Several participants became alarmed when they looked at my cards and realized that I cut into an actual dictionary - a disintegrating, 1960 student dictionary, I hastily explained in my defense.

The idea of libricide appalled me, too - at first. But  since discovering ATCs and their ilk, I've become much less squeamish. I only cut into out-of-date reference books, falling-apart books, or bestselling books of which used bookstores have far too many (How many paperback copies of Angels and Demons are at your nearest thrift shop? I counted nine in mine.) When in doubt, I check Amazon or ebay, to make sure I'm not about to eviscerate a Gutenberg Bible.

The base of an ATC is a stiff material of your choice, cut to  2 1/2" x 3 1/2".  Depending on how strong you need it to be, you can cut it from a Cheerios box, or buy pre-cut mat board, watercolor paper, chipboard, etc. Blank ATC packs of various materials are sold online or at an art supply/craft store. 

For this set of ATCs, I used Kraft-tex which is like a cross between fabric, leather and interfacing. It takes paint beautifully, with a misty dappled effect, and allows all kinds of watercolory techniques (learned from  Sherrill Kahn). I sprayed the Kraft-tex with water, then did mostly horizontal strokes with blue, purple and green shades of Dye-Na-Flow, letting the colors run together. Once dry, I cut the Kraft-tex into card-size pieces, and stenciled a seagull onto each, with shiny opaque silver acrylic paint. 

Then I found a comfortable spot in the middle of the floor, surrounded myself with bead and button boxes, Crafter's Pick The Ultimate Glue (my current fave for the 3-D embellishments), a glue stick (for paper and fabric), toothpicks (for precision glue delivery), a wire cutter (for snipping shanks off plastic buttons), a scissors, an X-acto knife, and ye olde dictionary, open to the "aero" page. 

Here's where the real fun began: Seeking definitions to fit my embellishments, and vice versa.  

The definitions had to be cut with an X-acto knife (or small sharp scissors), because the lines are so crammed together. The next card has a vintage propeller airplane button.

Below the next bird is a square chunk from an old French map:

 Here's a floating, lacy, metal UFO (broken earring?)

At one point, I became bored with the "ae" section of the dictionary, and flipped randomly to the fl's, where I spotted the soothing illustration below of a flageolet. (Never flog a flageolet, which is an offshoot of the flipple flute family - I kid you not). I also adhered a tiny woven label that says "Sweet Dreams." My  friend Kay gave me the label. I wish I had 100!

What I do have a 100 of is that question mark bead on the lower right. I found a pack at a store a few months ago. Those poor identical little beads, peeping out from behind the plastic, looked so lost and pathetically quizzical, that, of course I brought them home. Now I'm gluing them to everything but my forehead. It's the all-purpose existential embellishment, without the commitment or blood of a tattoo.

(Deja vu? Yes, you've already met that gal's identical twin, on my Elvis toy sewing machine.)

Once everything was glued down, I gave the cards a couple of coats of matte Golden Gel medium, brushing it carefully around but not on top of the 3-D embellishments. It created a nice even surface, and took the shine off accidental glue smears. Unfortunately, it also took the shine from the silver gulls. With not enough time to repaint the birds, I quickly learned to love grey, signed and dated the backs, and was good to go.

So easy!  So fun! So you-don't-have-to-be-an-artistic-genius! And that's not even the best part! The best part is the swap. This particular event was set up by a friend of a friend. I only knew one participant, and met 5 such interesting people, and learned so much from them through their art. We ate and drank yummy things, socialized, asked questions, and enjoyed each other's wildly diverse cards and ways of thinking. Thanks, Jenny, for putting the whole fantastic event together!

Now you know you want to do this, right? If you don't have enough like-minded friends, ask about swaps at your local art and/or craft store. Or go to Groups.yahoo.com/ and type in "Artist Trading Cards." Some groups trade through the mail; others arrange face-to-face meetings in specific cities. There are also lists of local exchanges at Artist-trading-cards.ch/events.html.

If you're primarily into fiber arts, you might find that this article I wrote a couple of years ago for Quilt Life magazine helpful. It is mostly about making fabric ATCs, especially from quilty UFOs. (In this case, the acronym stands for non-aeronautic Unfinished Objects). Some of the links listed in that article are extinct, unfortunately.

A final tidbit: ATC makers don't sell them. If it's called an ATC, it's individually made for the sole purpose of trading. If you make a card to sell, call it an ACEO, which stands for "Artist Cards, Editions and Originals." Zillions of ACEOs are sold online. Just search ebay.

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PS: I have no financial affiliation with any of the products mentioned by name in this post, except that I did receive a free roll of Kraft-tex in exchange for a completely different project. I truly  love the stuff.

Surfing the Planet of the Apes

This is the quilt in my header. I call it, "After the Fall: Surfing the Planet of the Apes."

It started out with a book by mixed media artist Sherrill Kahn, who writes about how to creatively paint, stamp and stencil on fabric. This particular technique involved a lot of wet fabric, masking tape stripes, cream and regular acrylic paints, and serendipity, my favorite thing.

I wound up with the central large rectangle, tan on the upper left, Caribbean blue elsewhere, with numerous  stripes. It looked like a beach, so I plopped a fish or two (cut from novelty fabric) on the blue side. And then I kept thinking that it needed a Statue of Liberty on the beach, which seemed very odd, until a few weeks later I woke up and realized that it was because of the final  scene in the first Planet of the Apes movie, when (spoiler alert) Charlton Heston, earth astronaut, shot into space in suspended animation, awakens several thousand years later on a planet where literate but cruel apes rule. At the movie's end, he is on the beach, and encounters the head and torch of the Statue of Liberty in the sand. That is the moment that he, and we, realize that they are not on an alien planet; they are on Earth, after an ape-friendly apocolypse.

Naturally, that got me thinking about the apocalypse we may face in the not-so-distant future, not from primates with British accents, but from climate change.

So I put the surfer in the sand.

If our waterways dry up, the next generation will need to invent recreational desert surfing. 

As for saving the environment, I had just learned to use Adobe Illustrator's multi-step 'blend' tool, which allows you to morph shapes from one to another in the number of steps you designate. I morphed the shape of the Statue of Liberty's torch, from its place on the upper left, first into old-fashioned lighbulbs, down the side borders, then into newer eco-friendly spiral lightbulbs, and then, further down  the sides and along the bottom border, some kind of fantastical bulb that has not yet been invented, but which we hope someone develops very soon, which will save enough energy to save the world.

I also extended some of the stencilled lines onto the black border, to unify the piece.

I had a lot of fun quilting waves, rocks, and some kind of radiating sea urchin-like circles into the water.

I wasn't sure what I was going to do with this admittedly odd piece, but fortunately, my teenage son took a liking to it, and now it hangs in his room. He tells me he's going to bring it to college with him next month! (Update: It now hangs over his bed at college!)

Wouldn't it be great if one of the fabric companies came out with Planet of the Apes fabric? I would definitely buy some of that! The only thing this quilt is missing is a kitchen sink, and a literate primate with a British accent.