This week, I’ve just discovered artist’s trading cards (ATC’s), and on Thursday made my first one.

I began with a cutout of a ceramic jug for inspiration (from a mag), which I could just “see” holding some doodley painted flowers.

Using acrylics, I painted a deep blue background, then used rich gold to cover the bottom 1/3 or so of the card to give the jug / vase something to sit on.

Next, I used spray adhesive to stick the cutout in place, and then dabbed some dusty pink “flowers” around the place.

After that, I outlined everything with a micron felt tip pen and added curly stems to the swirly flowers.

The last step was mixing a slightly duller gold to give the vase a shadow.

Oh, and I used my new corner punch to shape the card.

Overall, I’m pretty pleased with my first effort.

There are a couple of things I’ve learnt and will do differently next time:

Ensuring the spray adhesive is even, because part of the vase didn’t stick properly and is bugging me.

And using the corner punch more sparingly, as I think it looked better with just the top two corners punched.

What do you think?  Have you ever made an ATC?

Tags: artist trading cards, ATC's, collage

Saw this little doohickey on deviantart and had to share it, as it’s so in line with what I’m experiencing at the moment.

It’s so simple, and I never realised it until now that it actually is true…

I’ve neglected my santa & fairy doodles in favour of playing around with the bauble outlines.

(yes, i do have a short attention span)

Here’s another doodle I did the other day for the front of a card for our elderly neighbour, who had spinal surgery recently. – not sure what it symbolised, I just thought it was just sweet-looking.

Unfortunately, my short attention span & Chronic Fatigue Syndrome combined and I never did get around to making the card.

I actually think it was mainly lack of confidence.  I mean, what if she thought it was a crappy card?

So I chickened out and bought her a nice african violet for her kitchen windowsill.

- I can see it too when I go into our back yard

Tags: doodles, drawing, zentangle

I’m thinking of making our Christmas cards this year, and even though it’s still June (just) I’ve gotten started on doodling some designs for them.

Haven’t finished any as yet, but have plenty of wip’s on the go.
The way I work is to do a bit of a drawing, put it aside for a half hour or more, then pick up where I left off once I can “see” what comes next.

My first attempt is a robed, Santa-ish figure. Had some trouble with the face (i hate drawing faces), and decided to just do eyes peering out from between bushy eyebrows and mustache.

He’s also kind of stiff-looking, but for a first try he’s not so bad

I’m pretty happy so far with this next one, it’s on the way to becoming a Christmas fairy; maybe a sort of sugarplum fairy.

Have almost finished the skirt, but am not sure where I’m going with that bodice. -What shape the neckline will be is still a mystery to me!

Then comes the arms, legs & head. I’m favouring plain black silhouette style arms, & ballet slippers with ribbons laced up the legs.

Another idea for Chrissy cards is of course baubles, and I have a few of those in the works, too.

Found outlines kind of fiddly until I hit on the idea of tracing around a cup (d’uh).

I thought you might find some bauble shapes fun to use with either zentangle doodles or digiscrap, so I scanned them before I began filling them out with designs and patterns.

Here’s four Christmas ornament shapes in png format (transparent backgrounds) for you to do whatever you want with.

They’re a bit rough, as I haven’t done anything other than remove the background so that you can fit them to a page and print them out using Word or whatever program suits.

Hope you get some use from them

Tags: Christmas, doodles, drawing, free graphics, freebies, zentangle

I’ve discovered zentangles in the last few weeks, and I’m kind of addicted already.

To be honest, I’ve seen other people’s zentangles before and just not gotten around to trying it until now.

I’m really glad I have now, because the meditative aspect of drawing repetitive patterns (or “tangles”) is really relaxing, and seems to be hugely helping my stress levels.

From what I’ve read around the interwebs, I’m not alone in that.
People have apparently had all sorts of positive health effects after getting involved in zentangling.

This is my first attempt, in which I tried to use as many different tangles as I could.
I think I ended up using about 19, and it took me about a week to finish because I ended up filling up a whole A4 page.

The best place to find out about all the different patterns people have created is at tanglepatterns.com, which is like a kind of directory of all the tangles out there on the web.

So have you tangled yet?

The Zentangle® art form and method was created by Rick Roberts and Maria Thomas and is copyrighted. Zentangle® is a registered trademark of Zentangle, Inc. Learn more at zentangle.com.

Tags: doodles, drawing, zentangle

I loved making the Cutie Cupcakes cross stitch pattern so much, that I decided to turn them into graphics for you to download

It was a lot easier than I’d thought, having the basic designs already done.

All I had to do was smooth the edges and apply pse’s watercolour effect, then atomic cupcake’s puffy felt action (yum).

I find that the watercolour effect just adds a bit of a variegated effect to what might otherwise be bland-ish areas of colour.

Four puffy felt cupcakes, saved at 300ppi.

Download from 4shared or mediafire