Black & White challenge ATC's

I have been on a short trip to Prague with my better half (bless her cotton socks for all the shopping we put in over the four days we were there). I was going to post a few photos of our sight-seeing triip but thought, "hey they can look it up on the web, and the photos will probably be better than I can show". So I have only one photo to show, It is actually an indoor shot from the Palladium shopping centre near the Republic Square in the Old Town. The photo is actually part of a frieze, decorating the gent's urinal. I needed four shots to get it all in but will only bore you with one. this has to be the overiding image of Prague for me.

I will tell you it can be quite intimidating using this facility, for most fellows and certainly caused a few laughs.

Anyway back to art.................... here are a couple of ATC's I made just before I flew off last week. It was for a challenge I had to set after winning the lottery with my ATC, "Carnival" as described in the last post. The titles are pretty self evident so I will leave you with the images








More art as soon as I have settled back in and cut the lawn and cliped the hedges and..................

Another wining ATC

What luck.............


I joined a couple of groups not long ago to increase my swapping opportunities and I have already mentioned winning a monthly lottery with my ATC entry called "Good Fortune " I have just found out that I have also won a second lottery on another group with this entry, "Carnival"

I am looking forward to recieving some fantastic ATC's from the other entries. I wonder to myself how much is this down to sheer luck....... or to my being a new member in these groups.

I now have to choose the new theme for the next lottery and pick a winner, the question is how do I choose?

Just for good measure, here are a couple of entries for the lottery on the first group (which I can't win this time)

I will be off-line for the next few days, so the appearance of comments will be delayed a little but please do feel free to make any comments as it is always great to hear from readers.

I have to dash now but next time I will be posting links to these groups, which are both on Yahoo. Adios

three new ATC's (Make it Mondays challenge)

Hi, its late and I have spent a glorious day in the garden, getting quite a lot done and it is now looking good. Note to myself.... must post a photo or two! Anyway, I have just discovered the Make it Monday challenge on the Go Make Something site (Lisa Vollrath). I actually came across it 3 or 4 weeks ago and did a digital image of Desperate Dan. I decided this weekend to start doing the challenge every week and thought as a first step I would catch up with the last three weeks. I have done so and wanted to get them on to the blog this evening, its time for a new post anyway.
Here they are, I actually found this to be quite difficult because I usually work from whatever I find which gets my creative juices running. So it was a real challenge. I may not have made three "great" works of art but it was fun and I think it taught me something.

The first was to do something with the theme of music. I found this difficult since I did not have the right images to hand but turned it around slightly (artist's licence) to become a card around Dance.

The second was to use a quotation... I again took a slight liberty and used the first two lines of a poem by Margaret Houghton. the main imagaes were heat embossed, a very new technique for me so it was a little bit of practice.

The last here is based on the colour RED. I call this holiday dreams. One of the reasons that I was keen to do all three was that I have been tasked with the job of writing about my ideas on the subject of the use of themes in ATC ( or any art). We tend to use the word loosely and although the above are said to be based on themes, I am more concerned with a theme within the art work. But that is for a future post. For now I hope you enjoy the images.

My ATC's are getting to be prettier

Hi, don't know if any regular readers ( assuming of course that I do have regular readers) have noticed but my ATC cards seem to be becoming prettier. This has not been a conscious decision and I am not necessarily upset by it, but I though it worth a mention. I can't help feeling this may be because I have been making a few greeting cards. My wife sees the opportunity to send some of her friends individually crafted cards and of course not knowing what they actually would like I guess they tend to be fairly conventional. When I first started making ATC's they were often humorous, but looking thru my back postings I find that there was a definite prettiness there too.


I guess that over the past few months (?) I have been more concerned with technique (and I have tried and learned the use of a lot of techniques) and maybe my style has drifted because of that. There are lots more of course that I want to try, and have today ordered a copy of Bernie Berlins book Artist Trading Cards Workshop: Create, Collect, Swap from Amazon.


Anyway, here are three more ATC's which I have completed this weekend, they have already been swapped and posted.

The first is titled, "Love is the key". You may remember the painted backings, which I posted a little while ago. the key is fixed loosely to the heart with coloured wire ( I was given a box with 24 reels for last Christmas and have hardly used them at all so far) everything is glued down.

Titled, "Hope" after the embossed text. Another acrylic backing with stamped chinese characters (I actually bought a black Stazon ink-pad for doing this), the card is completed with collage and a fancy thread attached via an eyelet.

Finally, "She Sparkled". A collage onto black card, stamped with gold stars (not Stazon,LOL). I painted the dress, armband and hair ribbon with mica-containing watercolours which is where I got the title from. I finished it with those faux gems across the arch and wrote on the title.

Many of my crafting friends would be commenting on a lack of "grunge" - well Tim Holtz may yet get my custom, but for now "enough is enough".

Oh I nearly forgot..... the second card in the last post was entered by me into a weekly lottery challenge in a group I have just joined and declared the winner (sorry I left off the title, but it is the one with the smiling sun), the challenge was to use circles, ribbon and faces. I am now looking forward to receiving lots of lovely ATC cards thru the post.