I am so excited and simply cannot contain my enthusiasm.  I just completed my first Artist Trading Card (ATC).  Thanks to Jessica’s knowledge of the internet and ability to always give me lots of creative ideas, I joined the swap-bot community.  This internet site is dedicated to providing artists with a forum to collaborate and exchange art through swaps.  I’ve wanted to do ATCs for years.  While digging through my stuff for inspiration and materials to complete this first card, I came across a receipt dated 2006.  All my thinking and planning for 3 years is finally coming to fruition.

The swap I joined is based on the alphabet.  Naturally our first card is the letter A – anything that begins with A.  I thought of some pretty funny ideas at first – like Anxiety (which had a number of ideas for interpretation and always included an image of “The Scream”) and Acid (where i would burn a hole in the card as part of the process).  No normal word like “apple” for this girl.  It wasn’t until I was going through my materials that the perfect A-word jumped out at me because for a while I was buying little decks of cards.  The smallest one I have one that is 1″ x 3/4″ – an ideal size for an ATC.   Suddenly my “A” ATC was born – Ace!  On top of being a reason to finally use the cute little deck, my 2nd child’s initials are A.C.E. so there is a little hidden meaning in choosing this word for me.

 The card is done one of the many ATC blanks I purchased back in 2006.  For the background I took a piece of window screen and red ink and used the screen as a stencil.  The image on the reverse of the little cards is very similar to the red speckled background created from pouncing the screen.  Next I took a harlequin background stamp and added the black. 

Once the background was done, I added the little cards.  The lace paper on the side is from 2006 and came in a packet I purchased for ATCs from one of my favorite online vendors – artchixstudio.com.  I believe it comes from Germany.  Finally the Scrabble tiles were added.  I sealed the entire card with Mod Podge “Sparkle”.

I’ll be placing the finished card into the mail tomorrow to my swap partner in Alabama.  I sure hope she likes it.