Artist Trading Cards

I’m digging making Artist Trading Cards. ATCs are fun and expressive art miniatures created on cardstock size: 2.5” x 3.5”. They are original, small editions (often collaged) that are self-produced and which pass hand-to-hand. Anybody can create ATCs!
For more info: www.artist-trading-cards.ch

A few cards I have recently made:

Monsters in the Deep. A friend gave me a handful of vintage vocabulary flash cards, and it’s been great taking a word and creating a collage around it. This card’s word is brackish, so I gave it a slippery-green watery-world and a tentacled monster eye. The other text reads: within an eye of glass and deep monster’s jaw, clipped from a handwritten Shelley poem.

A Predilection for Shakespeare. Another card using a flash vocab word. I had just seen a local production of The Taming of the Shrew and came home and made this Shakespeare themed ATC. I used some glorious Basic Grey paper backgrounds here.

Coming into Being. In this women’s themed ATC I was musing about how it is possible to reinvent yourself, rise above those aspects of the world that get you down and connect with personal strength and wisdom. It’s hard to see in this photo but the fruit tree overlay was a magazine clipping that I had turned into a photogram and printed in the darkroom on shiny transparent photo paper. It was fun to re-cycle that photo. (It is possible to print digital images onto transparent paper in the ink jet printer and get the same affect.)

Walk in the Visions of Poesy/Poetry. It was National Poetry month when I created this Percy Shelley themed card at the library ATC workshop. I try to keep Shelley’s world alive — he’s a poet dear to my heart.

This ATC was inspired by Russian animator Yuri Norstein’s Hedgehog in the Fog, anyone who hasn’t seen this animated short, check it out on YouTube. Too cute for words — you’ll be enchanted, maybe even mystified! (My husband did the owl and hedgehog drawings for our daughter and I stole them to make this ATC!)

I Wanted to Speak Through Trees. I’ve decided to recycle my old art school stuff, drawings, prints, photographs, digital collage (both my undergrad work and Master’s art miscellany). Here I’ve taken a letterpress poem I wrote and hand-printed on vellum, and two etchings I made, and created I Wanted to Speak Through Trees. My interpretation of this ATC is my constant desire to connect with nature and inspiration in a poetic, higher, deeply-felt way.