 Why hello there. I'm Sandy Allnock. Welcome to my YouTube channel where today I'll be making artist trading cards and I thought I would show you the process for what I'm doing for my ATCs for a swap and Explain what an ATC is and then invite you if you'd like to join us in a big old ATC swap All right, let's get started It is an ATC. It's an artist trading card Basically a little piece of you and your art that you share with others ATCs are not sold. They're only traded or given away you can take part in a swap and That would be when you share a bunch of cards with a bunch of people or one card with one person or A round robin kind of swap all different ones or run different ways and you can Google to find different ATC swaps The history of the ATC it's said to have originated in 1997 in Switzerland When someone with the last name of sternum, and I cannot pronounce the first name my apologies of Zurich Hosted the first swap and ever since then these little art pieces have been traded around the world The details of an ATC each one should be exactly three and a half inches tall and two and a half inches wide and I'm guessing you could do Horizontal orientations they don't have to be vertical, but the ones I see are vertical, but it's the same size as a baseball card Most of them are rectangular, but some artists will experiment with arched tops Folding flaps pockets all sorts of things. They should have a little bit of weight to them So they need to be at least card stock not lightweight paper But not so much that it couldn't slip into a clear plastic sleeve made for a trading card Some artists will include those interactive parts that fold or swing think about flaps and doors limbs on paper doll cards Tails on animal cards ears that pop up lots of different options But it needs to fold down to fit in the three and a half by two and a half inches ATCs can include texts like quotes or journaling Stamping painting pencil mixed media basically anything goes But the important thing is to make your ATC a reflection of you and your own style If you do cute then cute is perfect if you do grunge grunge is great But just remember these aren't throwaway art They aren't just something to do with that leftover scrap of something You want to put your heart into what you share because this is sharing your art. It's not just sharing your scraps ATCs are often traded inside of card sleeves to keep the art inside safe And those are the baseball card sleeves little individual ones Sleeves are not always required in a swap, but you need to check the requirements to see what's expected of you And if you start collecting a bunch of ATCs You can get one of those three ring binder sheets where you can put in a whole bunch of ATCs Just get the baseball card size And I'll link to both of these kinds of sleeves that I found online if you're interested in getting some of those I Keep a treasure box myself and I put these ATCs in there I have a bunch of them from years gone by and every once in a while I look through them for inspiration So there are three types of ATCs One is a one-off. It's a one-of-a-kind unique card You know never gonna make another one of it. You've made just a single one Secondly would be a series a few ATCs that are on one theme And they're usually numbered one of three one of four one of five, etc And then there's also an addition two or more cards that were created to look Identical and those would also be numbered one of three one of four one of five On the back of an ATC you want to include your information You can type it up and glue it on you can attach it that way You can get a stamp to do so you can hand write the information And I'll include a link to a stamp that I found in the supply list as well And you can find them in lots of different places and different stamp companies You want to include your name as the artist you want to include the date you made it The title if it has one your email or website and I would say do not include your phone number or your mailing address Just because you never know where this thing is going to end up if there's going to be a picture of it somehow taken For somebody's blog and you don't want your private information out there You also want to include any notes like whether it's part of a series or edition and If you are part of a swap make sure that you pay attention to the rules because some swaps will ask that you do a write-up on how you made the thing and what supplies you used etc And so if that's the expectation be sure you meet that Now why am I talking about ATCs? This is not a channel focused on ATCs Well at art venture we wanted to do another swap. So we decided on swapping ATCs this time The theme for it just very simply fall trees leaves pumpkin spice nesting Gratitude fall colors, which is what I'm focusing on Anything upbeat in the message and since we're going to be actually doing the swap in November. We're skipping the Halloween imagery The process for taking part in it. You're welcome to come join us Is that you'll need to sign up ahead of time to be part of the swap? the sign-ups are going to close on October 31st 2023 and There's going to be a couple different things We're going to do in sorting out the names if you want to participate in mailing Internationally you need to be ready right away when you get the name to drop it in the mail because sometimes it can take a week to two weeks to get to somebody and There's questions on the survey that will get you on to that international list if you'd like to do it Otherwise, we're going to swap each group with someone on their own continent And that's going to keep mailing costs down and the time factor and you'll receive a private message On art venture from one of our moderators on or about November 1st or 2nd Once we get all that sorted with the address of the person that you'll send to But you can start planning your card right now if you want and it's actually in my eyes better not to know who you're Sending it to so you don't become intimidated by them or go look up their art and try to make something for them You're making something that represents you For the due date ATC's should be mailed to arrive the week of November 12 to 18 And I'd prefer everybody try for earlier in the week because on the weekend of the 18th We'll have to decide whether it's going to be Friday night or Saturday We're gonna have a zoom call to share all the ATC's if you can't come to that zoom call Don't worry. You can still participate. You can watch the replay later And you can also post pictures of the ones that you received in the comments on the zoom post So that everybody can see what was received by each one of us So if you are interested in participating in the swap, then please do go to our adventure If you haven't heard me talk about that yet, I'm not sure where you've been but art venture is my community on mighty Networks and there are several thousand of us there as artists sharing our work There's no ads no algorithms just us and we share all kinds of things there homework from classes other pieces that we do all sorts of stuff and we can ask questions you can Talk to other artists about ideas that you have and we just give each other encouragement sharing our work So go there and look for the orange box in the featured section that has the information about the swap on it and Then you'll click through that Read any of the instructions that are in there. I mostly covered what was in that post here in this video but then at the end of that post is a link to Survey monkey and that survey is where you'll add your information, which is going to stay private You're only going to get an address for one person that you're swapping with and only one person is going to get your Address, but I will have access to all of it Which is why I am making many ATCs as you've been watching So I am going to be sending out nine ATCs and I'll be sending it to whoever I randomly get a sign to as Well as eight other people will get one randomly by surprise so I'm just gonna randomly draw names since I have the addresses to ship them out to and One of the other things if you are interested in this technique, but you don't make ATCs You're like what could I use this for what could I do with it? I have also done this kind of a thing in art journal pages And this would make a wonderful background for that You can even leave blank spaces where you want to have any of your journaling go in there If you have stamped pictures or something do this as a background Just throw some colors on there and blob some ink on and you're good to go And speaking of art journaling There's a class that I will be teaching in in November and it is called gratitude junk journaling It's over on teachable with my friend here And she gets a whole bunch of people a whole bunch of different artists teaching in the class And it's all month long and you get prompts and we talk about gratitude things were grateful for and Just different techniques and everybody's gonna talk about their own thing All the different teachers and there's a Facebook group that you can be in community with everybody else who's doing the class So the class starts November 1st Which means that early bird pricing is gonna end before that and I will put a link Down below and information about whatever the early bird deal is going on right now because the pricing changes throughout the month The earlier you purchase the better at the discount So if you're interested in art journaling then come join me and everybody else for that one Now let's talk a little bit about my ATC's. They told you I was gonna make nine out of this and What I did was use the few colors that I have left in my pH Martens collection of paints a bunch of them I've dried up because they've been sitting on the shelf just looking pretty Because they are like a rainbow of pretty bottles and I have just not been using them because they're hard to get to I have all kinds of stuff piled in front of them and they just kind of peek out as little rainbow soldiers and I need to go through them because I realized when I went to grab some colors for this project that a lot of them are Just all dried bummer But maybe I'll do some painting with whatever colors remain in the near future So I can use them before they all totally go belly up but I put the color on the watercolor paper, this is cold press watercolor paper and Smushed it just closed it up now if you're doing art journaling You could do the same thing with a two-page spread Just put the paint on one side and then close it And let all that color mush over to the other side Keep that in mind if you're looking for any crazy background ideas Because this ink blot thing it's kind of fun so what I've Then did once it was dry was to use a pipette to put the ink on because that gave me thick and thin lines I wanted to have some thicker heavier black But I knew it would take forever to achieve that with A fountain pen because I'd have to just keep drawing thicker lines And I wanted the line work to go a little bit faster so the pipette worked really well to kind of squish out a bunch of You know different thicknesses of ink and get the main lines in there And then I could fill in with the fountain pen for all the rest with my eco twizby medium nib And then once I finished all that all I had to do was chop them up And turn them into the right size for atcs And I did go back through on a bunch of them Because you know once you trim those down You end up seeing where there might be a vacant space that needs a little more detail added to it, etc And this whole thing left me with Two strips that I can use for bookmarks and then two other small chunks that I can use for cards as well So I'm just about done here All I have to do is add my information onto the backs of these and I will be ready to go Come early November If you would like to participate in the swap remember the link is down in the doobily-doo below this video And also remember you might randomly get one of these and you can actually see it in person And this is the lovely selection of ladies who are teaching in gratitude junk journal class You can see my little happy face there. So I hope you'll join us That's going to be a wonderful month of just being thankful I will see you guys soon get out there and create something every day and I'll see you next time