Hits and Misses

As the chaos of trying to keep the house looking great for the final walk through for our home's buyers, I just couldn't put away the art work.  I figured they know people actually live here, so I continued to work in the studio and I'm glad I did.

Making ATCs is such a foreign form of art for me and I continue to push myself to just do it, just make something and not feel like I have to create a masterpiece.  I must pat myself on the back for a job super well done.  There are no masterpieces in the lot :-)  Some of them came out pretty darned OK, at least for a token give-away for a young child.  I figure the bigger the "miss," the younger the child that should get it.  Bahaha.

I have a small stash of different kinds of blank ATCs - both black and white heavy card stock, white lighter card stock, and linen finish canvas that the package says is for acrylic paint (Fibbers!  It curls like mad the moment it's damp.).  I bought them to use for experimenting since I had absolutely NO idea what I was doing.  Now let me remind everyone, I have confessed right up front that I'm a big cheater and, worried about lacking the skills to produce work that wouldn't cause me to die of shame, I purchased stickers.  These all have stickers.  I painted the background and added a few other touches, but the fish in this batch are all purchased. 

 This one was my favourite of the ones I made today.  I was a little zealous in my application of Judi-Kins Diamond Glaze to produce the "bubbles."  I love this stuff.

 The background for the seahorse card is a small portion of the most amazing quilt that I saw at a major show here in California a year or two ago.  I figured I wasn't breaking any rules if I printed a fraction (about 1/100th) of the image and used it for something I was giving away.  Hope I'm not wrong!

 Now we're getting close to the "miss" zone.  I used a bit of paper from a magazine page and another from a packet of origami paper and, yes, more stickers.  But I did paint the background!  Finger painting is NOT just for little kids.

  In an effort to make an ATC that didn't look too girlie, I just painted this dark background and attached vellum seaweed with gel medium.  Alas, it didn't look as tidy as I'd expected, but I'm going to stick with the story that the gel medium gives it texture because seaweed looks like this.  Yup, that's my story.  I live near enough to to the beach, so that should lend me some sense of authority on the subject, no?

 Now we start getting deep into the "miss" zone.  I stuck on the coral, then couldn't get it off.  So I just stuck on some fish.  I thought it looked too bare, and stuck on that other pink thingy on the bottom left.  See how much thought I put into this?  Good grief.

 I think I actually called this one "Two ugly fish" on the computer file.  Or maybe it's the one above that I called "Three ugly fish."  Again, once these suckers are on, there's no taking them back off.  It looks like they're burping.  I'm trying to figure out what makes one ATC work and the next one not work.  Composition?  Contrast?  Just the plain old ugly factor?  Well, some five year old my love it.  Maybe I should just write in a cartoonish bubble with the word "Burp!" on it to distract them.

I kind of like this one.  It's simple and not too ugly and the fish aren't burping. 

In any case, it's just been fun to experiment.  I've learned to pay attention to the cardboard that I cut to attach these to for extra support (the curly cards do not yet have card stock added for extra support).  One must pay attention to whether one is gluing the ATC to the side of the cardboard advertising the once-contained vegetarian sausage patties, or to the blank side so that the person flipping over the card can read all about vegetarian sausage patties.  Lesson learned and cardboard now discarded.  Time for a do-over on those two.  Note to self: glue ATC to the side with the photo of the sausages.