All caught up (sort of)

I have really been enjoying working through the Artist Trading Card Workshop book with my fellow artists at the Artists of the Round Table (A.R.T.) Yahoo group. I just always feel like I am behind. Each Sunday the new lesson is posted so in my mind the lessons go from Sunday to Sunday...And in my world it seems impossible to get them done and posted earlier than the last day. What kills me is the number of people in the group who post their work on the FIRST day. It is not that I don't want them to get them done early. It just causes me a dilema because I want to look and see all the wonderful work people are doing (and believe me, these people are AMAZING!!!) but I also want to experiment with the techniques myself without being influenced by other people's work. So all week I avoid looking at all the cool artwork and then spend hours looking at it all at once after I finish. So here I am posting lesson four and soon I'll be trolling the photos of everyone else.


One of my favorite parts of this week's lesson was that I finally got some color copies of some antique advertising cards that I had bought and used two of them for two of the cards. The first card was to incorporate a page from the telephone book. I had this image of the man and was trying to come up with an appropriate concept when I happened across the yellow pages section for "Process Servers". It seemed to be destiny for this man so the card was born. I used the section from the yellow pages and covered the unrelated part of the page with black ink to draw attention to the "Process Servers" section. I added some stenciled and stamped "$" over the background and then finished off the piece with the man and a piece of gold german scrap.

The second ATC is my version of the tissue paper background. I had some tan tissue paper with line drawings of dragonflies on it and started with that as my base. I attached a piece over black matboard, allowing a few wrinkles to form in the tissue paper. I colored the background with LuminArte Twinkling H2Os and then outlined the dragonfly with a black gel pen, adding highlights with a white gel pen. The flower was lighly brushed with Twinkling H2Os as well.

My last ATC was the hardest for me to come up with a concept. The assignment was to use string but I needed to have the string make sense in the context of the card's topic. That was when I spotted the advertising card that I had copied that was for a corset. I used the add for the background, distressing it with two colors of ink and then stamping the word "CORSETS" at the top with Distress Ink. I added eyelets along the edges and laced the card with copper cording. It is funny how once you find a concept you like, things just flow.

My goal for lesson five is to post it before next Sunday. Wish me luck. :-)