For those who don't know, ATC stands for Artist Trading Cards. ATCs are mini works of art. As far as I know there are two general rules with ATCs. One is the size - they must be 2.5x3.5 inches (or 64x89 mm). Think the size of a baseball card. The other rule is they are intended to be traded or given away and must not be sold.
I knew I wanted the ATC to have a Mardi Gras mask. I found some shrink plastic sheets (a.k.a. Shrinky Dinks in my childhood) and thought they would be perfect material for a mask embellishment. Shrink plastic can be cut to shapes, colored, stamped, etc and it shrinks to a small size when heated. I found this mask template online and traced it onto the plastic. I always write the word "template" on any of my paper templates so I know not to accidentally recycle them.
After it was cut out I stamped the piece using a harlequin background stamp made by Inkadinkado. The green ink was an archival ink pad by Ranger. I colored the white spaces purple using a colored pencil.
The original size of the shrink plastic mask is almost 6 inches long. But after this is heated up it will be small enough to fit on an ATC card...trust me! I punched hole on the tops of the mask. You must punch holes BEFORE heating the plastic.
I used a heat gun while holding wood chopsticks to hold the piece in place while heating it. It moved around a lot and I guess it would have been easier if I used a toaster oven. In any case be careful when working with this material because it gets hot (but does cool quickly). Always follow the package directions on how to use it.
And here is the mask after heating...it shrunk to just over 2 inches! While it was still hot, I used a spatula and moved it to a foil wrapped can so it would dry curved. I wanted the mask to have some dimension and stand out on the card.
Here's a close up of the newly created mask embellishment. I used a gold paint pen to outline the mask and add details.
Next was creating the card background. Any guesses as to my art supply of choice? Yep, it was alcohol inks. Actually I did try some other materials first; water colored backgrounds, stamped backgrounds and even layering tissue papers. But I liked the thought of using gold metallic alcohol ink to give it lots of shimmer. Other alcohol inks used were Bottle and Purple Twilight.
It took several tries to get a background I was happy with. Some other papers that didn't make the cut are shown here - but they won't get thrown away. If I don't use them in another background I'll use them with punches for embellishments.
I used rubber stamps and black archival ink to add a fluer de lis image and a French scrip.
Laissez Les Bons temps Rouler!
