Collection by
Carol Abel

Challenge

Here at Soul Food I am happy to present a gallery of ATC's based on the theme, Journey of the Heart. Send five images to heatherblakey@iprimus.com.au
and they will form a collection to be archived as a part of the Lemurian Artefacts project.

Make Artistic Trading Cards to Preserve the Journey: presented by Carol Abel

ATCs or Artistic Trading Cards are meant to be traded for other cards rather than sold although they are now auctioned regularly on e-bay. Their popularity has increased enormously as it is an inexpensive way of acquiring a piece of original art.

Their size is fixed at 2-1/2 x 3-1/2 inches and they can be produced in as little as 10 minutes or considerably longer, depending on how meticulous you are and the medium used. They can be drawn, painted, collaged, stamped or digital or a mixture of some or all of these elements. Full sized collages can be reduced in size, using a photograph editing programme, to the required size

Objects of desire - started life as an A4 sized collage which I then scanned and reduced.

Different supports can be used from stiff card, old playing cards or the new magic trading cards which are just the right size and are strong enough to bear multi-layered collages without becoming too deformed. They can also be made from fabric. Usually the backs are not decorated and the artist puts his/her name, title of the card, indication of whether it's part of a series, date and e-mail address. It is quite easy to produce your own labels for this, if you want.

I first started by cutting out my own cards from stiff card but have now graduated to using magic trading cards. I usually start by glueing a piece of coloured paper on to the card to form the background and then continue collaging on top, as well as rubber stamping, image transfer, layering and adding embellishments. Mostly I use collage to produce my ATCs.

The first ones I ever did were illustrations of opera titles

Someone saw the ATC 'un ballo in maschera' in my picturetrail and contacted me to ask if I would be willing to swap it. That someone was Rachel Murphree with whom I have subsequently become cyber friends and with whom I am currently involved in an art journal round robin if you click on the cover of mine - a Sea Symphony - you can see what has been done in it so far. I then joined a Yahoo group to swap ATCs and produced several series for a number of different swaps:

Sometimes you can create ATCs from ephemera that other people have sent you (rather like the footprint challenge).

These two were made this way as part of an ephemera challenge

while these two were a part of a a dictionary swap where each participant was sent several pages from a dictionary and had to illustrate a different word on each card.

Dictionary scrapbook has a miniature scrapbook stuck to which opens to reveal several different pictures inside it.

Type ATC into a search engine and you will find plenty of sites to explore. The definitive one is Artist Trading Cards and Cedarseed has lots of information about how to make them as well as a picture gallery.