As some of you know I love to collect postcards.  A couple of years ago I joined postcrossing.   Its a lot of fun receiving and swapping postcards with people from around the world.  After a few months I wanted to try to create my own postcards to send out but was discouraged by the fact that even though people are not supposed to be picky about the postcards they get many people make lists on their profiles of the cards they do not want to receive and many of those listed that they did not want handmade cards.  After a while I decided to do some anyway and did a few zentangle postcards but only mailed them out to family and when on the rare occasion I came across someone on postcrossing who didn’t mind handmade postcards.

So your probably wondering what the heck does this have to do with Artist Trading Cards (ATCs) and what the heck are Artist Trading Cards?  Well after I was discouraged I did several searches for creative/art swaps and one of the things I came across was ATCs.  ATCs are small works of art that measure 2¹⁄₂ by 3¹⁄₂ inches which is the size of baseball trading cards. They are created by artists and traded for other artist’s ATCs.  It sounded interesting but I only came across yahoo swaps. I really wanted something more official.  I planned to look further into it but then life got in the way as it always does and I just placed ATCs on a long list of things I wished to do someday.

Then towards the end of  last year I came across Rhonda Chase‘s Creature Cards kickstarter.  After the kickstarter ended Rhonda and I would email each other from time to time.  I told her how I had wanted to create and collect ATCs for a while and that she was the first in my collection.  She mentioned a few places I could look into swapping for ATCs.  One of them was ATCsforAll.  I looked into it and decided to join.  Before I could start swapping I wanted to create a few ATCs so that I could have some ready to trade immediately. I created some zentangle inspired ones and some splotch monsters which were inspired by Rhonda.

I’ve created a few albums to post images of the ATCs I create and receive.

ATCs Available for Trade
ATCs Traded
My ATC Collection

Here are a few pictures of the ATCs I created.  Though you can view each one individually in the albums listed above.

The first few ATCs I created.

Splotch Monsters ATCs inspired by Rhonda.

More splotch monsters ATCs inspired by Rhonda. My husband created the splotches and I created the monsters.