altered playing cards (APC)

MMSA is having an APC swap so I dug out my cards and did a few. Made me remember why I like ATCs so much - the tightly defined design space. You have to be creative in 8.75 square inches - the area of a 2.5" x 3.5" ATC or a standard playing card.

I've recently been paging thru Artist Trading Card Workshop by Bernie Berlin, trying to add a few more tricks to my usual collage/gelli/stencil/doodle repertoire. It's one of my go-to books  because the techniques are mostly ones that use supplies I already have on hand and it's chock full of finished ATCs by a variety of artists so there's lots of idea-inducing eye candy.

Anyway, I had the hots to do some gel medium transfers so I dug around for likely looking images of women or kids and slathered a few layers of gel medium on them.

While they were drying, I collaged some gelli printed book page onto one of the cards and some white tissue paper layers onto a few others. Sprayed the still-wet tissue paper with inks, then with water and let two of them drip onto the third. Two got two layers of tissue but on the third I wadded it all up and made a highly textured surface. Took forever to dry but it looks cool.

As I was rubbing the paper off the transfers I tore the eye area off the little girl, and said a dirty word. Then I realized it wasn't a disaster, it was a design opportunity! (put another layer of gel on the other two transfers cause one 'opporunity' a day is enough for me)

I get impatient with the rubbing-paper-off part and always get too rough with them. They are very delicate, and I know that but I still do it pretty much every time. (what's the definition of 'stupidity' again?)

The top two pics are the correctly done transfers and the third one is the one-eyed girl. Shoulda put her a one-eyed Jack card, huh? Didn't think of that till just now. Darn.

Found some appropriate text in my folder of old book pages, drew a branch on the textured one, and wa-la - four APCs for the swap. They didn't all have to be green for the swap but that's my color family these days.