ATC THURSDAY

ATCs: My newest delightful hobby. Thanks to Swap-bot.com, I'm exploring them more or less regularly, meaning I've signed up for several ATC swaps and have completed two, for a total of four ATCs. That's a start, right?

I did two of them today, and they're nearly identical:



The theme, as you might guess was "Apple". I first found a clipart image of two apples, saved it to my computer, simplified and resized it, and then printed four of them out on a clear acetate sheet. I suspected I'd mess up at least one of them; I was right.

While (I vainly hoped) the ink was drying on the acetate, I took two pages from an old dictionary, one with the word "apple" on it, the other with the word "fruit". I painted an area on each of them a little bigger than the ATCs would be with red, brown, magenta, and green paints on a fairly dry brush, and then stamped APPLE and POMME on both of them. (I have a stamp that you can load with whatever letters you need, and I LOVE it.)

The hardest part was gluing the acetate sheets down. The ink never did dry, and it smeared with the slightest touch. I put a dab of glue on the two places that had no inking, and glued them, image side down, and when the glue was dry I painted on two coats of gel medium.

When that was dry, I took a fine-tip black Sharpie and drew over some of the lines. That was the last step.

They turned out okay, I think, and I learned something valuable: don't try to inkjet print on acetate!