Wednesday, October 24, 2007
A New Addiction
A couple of weeks ago, I was perusing the boards at Romance Divas and came upon an announcement about swapping trading cards. I didn't know what it was going to be about, but I opened the message out of curiosity, forgetting that old adage about curiosity and cats.
From that message, I learned about a form of art I'd never heard of before: Artist Trading Cards, or ATCs. These are small trading cards, 2.5 by 3.5 inches, and they are each miniature works of art. They can be any medium--paint, drawing, computer-generated, collage . . . The list goes on. These cards are meant to be traded, never sold, and there are various communities dedicated to setting up swaps, where you send in X number of cards you've made and get back the same number of cards from others in the swap. The Romance Divas were setting up a swap in February, which was why the topic had been brought up.
Now, my first reaction was on the lines of "gee, isn't that nice that they're going to do that, but I don't do art, so this has nothing to do with me." But as I kept perusing the thread and saw pictures of the cards the other Divas were producing, an idea tickled my brain for a way I could make cards myself without having to be a artist. After all, most of these cards are a kind of folk art, not produced by professional artists.
What I decided to do was a kind of mini collage. I printed up all kinds of colors, textures, and patterns on full-sheet label stock, then cut those swatches into various shapes and stuck them onto cardstock that I'd cut into the right size. I decided I very much liked the results, and now I'm completely addicted! I love working with interesting colors and patterns, and the miniature scale of the cards makes them somehow more approachable.
I'm really enjoying working on them, though there is a little niggling voice in my head that suggests I shouldn't be allowing myself a new obsession when I have an aggressive deadline for my next book. But still, it's nice to be able to do something creative that doesn't require me to sit in front of the computer. Here are pictures of some of my early creations:
posted by Jenna Black @ 11:22 AM
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2 Comments:
They're very cool, Jenna!
I like the cards you've done. I hadn't heard of those cards before either. now I want to see more. :-)
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