Artist Trading Cards

I got some time and inclination to play today, so here are


Available for trade if anyone's interested.

The list of swaps I'm currently working on:
altered tin, any subject - not complete
6 cryptid ATC - not complete
10 4x6 post secrets - complete but not mailed
1 4x4 glittered beauty - complete but not mailed
3 fetish themed ATC - 1 set complete; 2 of 3 complete in second set

( NSFW - completed ATCs for fetish themed swap )

Please don't be too brutal. These are my first attempt at ATCs. I made these over the weekend. I like the one I call 6 Wives best. The subject matter (and story behind the ATC) are near and dear to my heart. Also I think the other two cards are a tad predictable. Anyways, here they are:




6 Wives




Kwan Yin




Love Me Tender...

Just playing around with watercolors again tonight...trying to do something like a Japanese cherry blossom (sakura) set. These are what I ended up with...

Sakura #1:

Ok, this one is a complete and total experiment. I've never used watercolors before tonight, but my wife has a set and I was feeling experimental. My undergraduate degree was in architecture (before I moved on to photo and other types of design), so I have several floorplans and whatnot still around from those days. The base of this ATC series was one of those from a class I was taking. It's one of my favorite designs from that stage in my education. Anyway, so I scanned that plan in, scaled it down to ATC size and printed it on watercolor paper. Then I painted a quick layer of watercolor over it. Finally, I flicked a little watercolor on as a top layer. It took 4 attempts at this set before I produced anything I was willing to share :) The rest are totally terrible and directly in the trash (well, except for the set right before this one that I might be able to salvage some parts of). The scans aren't the greatest of course because my scanner always harshly picks up the watercolor paper texture. On to the show:

I just received my end of our trade from lightindarnkess (from the Teesha Moore series: "No Matter What") and it's absolutely wonderful! While I'm posting this, I also wanted to say a big thank you to the following people for making my early days in the ATC world just as fun as possible:

lightindarnkess - great trader with beautiful cards!
bnpqoe - fantastic cards...hopefully I'll be able to trade for more in the future!
jmb367 - beautiful travel series!
stevenspat (from ATCards.com...not sure if they're on LJ) - really cool digital ATC!

Sorry for taking so long on some of these to publically say what awesome traders these people are. Everything arrived quickly and all the cards look just amazing in person. If I'm trading with you and didn't mention you above, they haven't arrived yet...I'll post about you too when they get here :)

Anyway, I just wanted to do that because I've only been in this community for a very short time, but I've already received some seriously great cards! I'm so happy I found this place :) Thanks for the warm welcome, great critiques and comments and fun trades!

Thanks guys!
Brandon

**EDIT**
Just FYI - If I have a trade currently going with you, your cards have been mailed. I shipped out 3 packages today and I'm all caught up :)

So, I just finished my latest ATC series and it's a little odd. I've been thinking about this one for a while, finally got everything together today and spent some time working on it. I'm not sure what I think about it yet...

Here's the background...
My wife and I had a trip to Dallas a few months back. While we were there, we went to some of the touristy places around town. Took in a Rangers game, went to the West End Marketplace, and of course, went down to Dealey Plaza, the Texas Schoolbook Depository and the JFK Memorial. It was a very eerie place to visit...I'd been there before, but it had been several years since the last time. We both took a bunch of photos around all of the area and I decided to try working with a panoramic "stitching" program I had downloaded. I shot a group of photos to use for the panoramic while a bunch of high school students were sitting in the grass listening to their teacher and some of the other random people there talking about JFK. In the middle of taking my panoramic group of photos, the teacher called the kids to leave, so the program had weird information to work with when trying to stitch together the images. The final panoramic ended up looking like there was a bunch of motion and ghosting all around the area.

Of course, when I started working on ATCs and looking through my photos to see what might be interesting to work with, this one stood out to me. I've been putting it off until I had all of the pieces that I needed. It's a little odd, slightly creepy...so I'm putting it behind the cut.

Just an idea I've been kicking around that I wanted to try. I eat Japanese food as often as I can and the restaurants around here have some great business cards. I used cards from four Austin local restaurants as a starting point and then added accents of Japanese stamps, rubber stamping, Ukiyoe seals, and some leftover fiber paper. Just having fun with compositions and placement to see what I could come up with.

Japanese Take-Out #1 **TRADED**
"Sushi Sake"

I've been playing around with more of my photographs and stamps for a new ATC. This one starts with another Holga photograph taken around my great-grandmother's home/farm. She raised chickens when she was alive...the chicken coop is still out there, but it is all grown over with weeds and flowers. It was very pretty, but dilapidated. I ordered a random assortment of Czech stamps off of eBay and they came in the other day, so I used some of them for playing around with this card. I think I like the way it came out, but I'm still not sure about the rubber stamping...

Anyway, comments and criticism are always welcome. Here's my favorite of the four card edition:

I made the following sets for a couple of multi person swaps at another site. Just thought I'd post them here in case anyone wants to see them. I usually don't do a lot of hand drawings and these are definitely based closely off of original drawings by the creators of My Neighbor Totoro (Hayao Miyazaki) and Naruto (Masashi Kishimoto) and the manga artist of FLCL (Hajime Ueda). For the FLCL one, I was trying to decide what to do when </a></a>jmb367's "Australia" ATC arrived. I loved the simplicity of style she used and decided to do something similar based on one of Ueda's FLCL drawings and this is what I came up with:

It's all cut out of different colored/patterned cardstock.

I was supposed to be cleaning off my tables, then I got to playing.  It's been ages since I made some artist trading cards.  The one with the two little girls I actually sewed through the button holes.  The third card, "Hot in the 50's" is my favorite of the three.

I've got all my new ATCs up! I like them a lot so I'm very excited.

The best one:



Click here for more.

I have three folded and one folded pop-up type Christmassy ATcards to trade. I made them for my local trading group and have some extras that are perfect for this time of year. I love to get surprises so it doesn't matter what you send me, just let me know if you want one and it's yours.