Finished ATC Series: Vintage Boy's Toys

I had some fun making some ATCs this week.

I had taken some money that I received for Christmas and purchased some new, unmounted rubber stamps from a small rubber stamp making company who runs an eBay store. The brand of the rubber stamps is Mars Tokyo/ Adorned Surface/ Hissy Fit and I blogged about them in the past, here. You can see images of the stamps in that blog entry.

I had never used the stamps until this week, for this project. These stamps are great! They are high quality unmounted rubber stamps. My boys also love them.

The other day my older son and I woke up before my younger son. My son asked if he could do some rubbers stamping with me.

I took out a large sheet of watercolor paper which I had put some left over watercolor paint onto about a week ago. The color was a medium blue.

Using various dark shades of ink, I randomly applied rubber stamp images of vintage boy's toys all over the page. Some of the inks were pigment dye so they had to dry overnight.

The next day I randomly cut the paper into ATC-sized pieces. It was interesting to see what each ATC had on it. Some did have blank areas on it, that needed filling.

Today I spent about 15 minutes filling in the blank areas with the smaller sized toy stamps. While I did that both of my sons were using the stamps on white sheets of paper.

After I make the backs for them they will be ready for trading. Once I removed ones which didn't have good imprints, there are 17 left.

This is the second time that I have tried making a sheet of art and randomly cutting it into ATCs. This is fun!

I would like to add that although it may seem that I slapped this together, I can assure you that this took some time and thought. I didn't just go crazy and stamp in a messy manner. When I create individual designs which are detailed collages or are mixed-media, I can easily spend 45-60 minutes on each ATC. These didn't take that long, I estimate I spent about 2.5 hours making them, not including set up and clean up time. I guess 17 ATCs in 2.5 hours is pretty fast compared to 1 hour for one.

Okay, signing off now to go make the backs and to scan them.

Technorati Tags: ATCs, artist trading cards, rubber stamps.