In Photo ATC Swaps

I have not blogged much about making ATCs lately. Truth be told I’m only doing 2-4 swaps per month (and some require making only one ATC). I have been busy with parenting, homeschooling, and expending emotions on worries about sick and dying relatives.

Apologizes for still not having uploaded images of my Yu-Gi-Oh! ATCs. Someday I’ll get around to doing that.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve been working on photo ATCs. For the swaps I chose to sign up for, I knew I had images already taken in the past. I did spend a lot of time going through all the images to select my favorites and those which conformed with the rules.

Time crept up on me and for the first one I was working against a tight deadline for getting the photos printed up at the photo shop. My husband was too busy to help me resize them (as he has done in the past) so I decided to teach myself how to do it, using my program, Photoshop Elements.

There was a problem with the way I saved the document. I now know I should have never let the system default to saving it as a Photoshop type document. I should have overridden that and saved it as a jpg. I thought I was ready to upload the photos to the photo shop via the Internet but I could not get them uploaded as the shop does not take files in a Photoshop format.

I tried teaching myself how to fix this but doing the fix did not work. I even found a Yahoo Group! for users of Photoshop Elements and got some help from a few folks but my husband and I suspect that the files were corrupted.

So in the time crunch my husband did the entire project over again in his other Microsoft program.

The first swap didn’t require putting a stronger backing on the photos so I sent them off as is.

This next swap requies gluing the photos to a cardstock for strength. I have the ATC sized photos all cut out and just need to do the adhering, then they’ll be ready to send off.

I have been sharing some of these photos on my blog here.

Another swap I did entailed taking my own photos and cropping them to 'inchies' which are one inch squares. I use a punch die-cutter for this task (simple and fun). I did that last week and they flew off through the mails last week.

My next ATC projects will be for swaps for techniques in the Bernie Berlin book about ATC techniques. We’re doing ‘phone book paper’ background and ‘stencil’ (use paint and a stencil to make a background).

The above swaps are on Swap-bot.com.

Oops and I have not yet done my October ATC exchange for the Creative Mom Podcast group, which is one ATC with a theme of ‘tell me a story’.

Technorati Tags: artist trading card, ATC.