Art Day: Artist Trading Cards

For many years, my sister has been re-branding Valentine’s Day as not a day to buy overly expensive material things to prove your love but a day about appreciating beauty and creating art. Way more classy than an Anti-Valentine’s Day party in my book.

We celebrated Art day on February 15th this year–because we had the weekend off–by making Artist Trading Cards. Apparently this is a big thing, but it was my first time hearing about it. My mom gave us a brief oral presentation about history and such. If you want to know more I encourage you to do your own batch of Google searching, there are tons of links.

I think the Wikipedia page offers a good summary:

Artist trading cards (or ATCs) are miniature works of art about the same size as modern trading cards baseball cards, or 2 ¹⁄₂ by 3 ¹⁄₂ inches, small enough to fit inside standard card-collector pockets, sleeves….Cards are produced in various media, including dry media (pencils, pens, markers, etc.), wet media (watercolor, acrylic paints, etc.), paper media (in the form of collage, papercuts, found objects, etc.) or even metals or fiber. The cards are usually traded or exchanged. 

There are tons of lesson plans and how-tos around the Interwebz. One I found fairly decent was a Wikihow page in 11 Steps where they suggest using playing cards if you can’t cut out the typical size for the cards.

The School Arts Room website offers a more standard layout of a classroom lesson play for the teacher types of the world. The Student ATC website has several great sub-pages with some theme ideas to get your brain or your pupils’ brains working. It also includes a little history and a how-to.

We all had Valentine’s Day and love related things on the mind but our official theme for our Art Day was Truth, Beauty, Freedom and Love. Yeah, inspired by some Moulin Rouge loveliness.

There were several different artists present and art styles. Forgive me if you don’t get our sense of humor. We had a blast and created art cards for almost five hours.
Sorry I didn’t get a picture of our hugely messy art table. There were stacks of colored paper, stickers, markers, paints, crayons and tons more stuff. We had a blast cutting and pasting and creating. Our art cards were cut out of index cards and my mom purchased a package of 100 trading card sleeves for storage once finished. 

Ideally, these are supposed to be traded, not sold. I’m not sure if anyone would pay for mine, but there are some really inspired pieces in here. I’m saving mine for last so you can be sufficiently unimpressed by my work.

On the backs of the art cards we wrote our artist name, state and month/year it was created. A couple of the cards even got named and those were written on the back. By the end of the evening most of us didn’t want to immediately trade our hard work, but we’re looking forward to creating more and maybe trading them or giving them others.

There is whole cluster of our pieces together.

Sorry for the fair bit of fuzz-o-vision. I didn’t have a good camera with me and the light wasn’t ideal. You get the idea here though.
Below is my cluster of cards:

And one of my personal favorites of the ones I created:

Doctors have started prescribing their patients with visits to National Parks. I have known for a long time that getting a daily dose of nature and light exercise can make huge wonders of difference. Recreation–my major–is hugely important to me.

Questions for my readers—-

Have you ever heard of artist trading cards? 

Have you been inspired by this blog, searching or the links provided to create your own mini-trading art cards? 

Do you have any fun alternative ways of celebrating Valentine’s Day?

Kat’s V-Day 2013

This Valentine’s Day went pretty well. I was very pleased that Kit and I decided to stay at home. I hate the stress of going out for a fancy dinner only to find every restaurant over-packed with other noisy people. Besides our food was better. First, we got semi-dressed up and were witnesses at a friend’s wedding. We had lunch with the happy couple and then went trudging to do the V-day shopping we should have done days before.
I was surprised how many men were snatching flowers with a desperate look in their eyes and how many folk there were in the grocery store.

This is a hugely popular DIY gift on Pinterest. The project is called 52 Things I Love About You. On each card I wrote something that I love about Kit. I copied some from another crafter, but I found that the ones that meant more were the personal ones. My Kit rarely wears pants. He is a shorts-man. Because of that fact I wanted him to wear shorts for our wedding. The phrase “Two Wild Banshees” is one of those things I catch him saying all the time.

When Kit looked through the cards on Vday, he was chuckling and smiling all the way through. Because I wrote on the face of the cards, they can still be played with normally.

Supper started the only way it could; with wine. I bought a bottle of the same wine we had for our wedding (a peach chardonnay) and threw some frozen peaches into it. Perfecto.

Honestly, the first thing I did was begin marinating the shrimp and steak. The shrimp was medium, fully-cooked and frozen. I used a lemon ginger marinade that I should have started the night before, but the hours run away from me. The marinade for 1 pound of shrimp is:

• 2 tablespoons and 2 teaspoons olive oil
• 3/4 teaspoon sesame oil
• 1 tablespoon and 1 teaspoon lemon juice
• 3/8 onion, chopped
• 5/8 clove garlic, peeled
• 2 teaspoons grated fresh ginger root
• 2 teaspoons minced fresh cilantro leaves (I used cubed bouillon style cilantro)
• 1/4 teaspoon paprika (dash)
• 1/8 teaspoon salt (dash)
• 1/8 teaspoon ground black pepper (dash)

I cubed up a steak and threw it into a gallon bag and tried to follow this steak marinade recipe: (I didn’t have W-sauce, oops!)

• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
• 4 cloves minced garlic
• 1/2 onion diced
• 1 teaspoon yellow mustard
• 1 tablespoon soy sauce
• dash of pepper

As you can see in the photo above, I skewered quartered small sweet onions, whole mushrooms (baby portabellas were on sale), whole grape tomatoes, and fat slices of red and green bell peppers. I baked these kabobs on a cookie sheet (I recommend putting aluminum foil on the trays to help with cleanup). Bake them for 10-12 minutes at 450F, flip them over and bake an additional 7-8 minutes. Thanks for the oven kabobs recipe, Sarra!

I made coca-cola cake for dessert. I failed to check my stock of butter and only had enough to make the cake and not the glaze that went on top. What makes coca-cola cake special or different from a regular chocolate cake? I honestly have no clue. Google is not helping a sister out either. It was a good recipe that I have to try again when I can do the glaze as well. I honestly love my mom’s recipe for crazy cake. This was more moist…almost like a light brownie.

The rest of the evening was spent enjoying our present that we gave to each other. Our Roku is so much better than jewelry I may never wear. Tons of Netflix TV shows at our fingertips. In one month, the Roku has already paid for itself several times over because we were frequent users of Redbox.

Day 289: Game Nights

Around Christmas, we all leave on our PJs (as long as possible) an drag out all the games we can find. The game pictured above is what I like to refer to as a smart folks’ game. It is called Set. There are different shapes, colors and types of shading. I play turns because I’m too much of a space cadet to play free for all. Awesome game for thinkers and I highly recommend it.

Hoopla is a super super fun game. It’s like a faster okay version of Cranium. Even better, the group works as a team to beat the clock. Competition, although nice at times, is not a strong suit of mine. It tastes yucky.

Boys playing something on the computer. The serious faces paired with the festive hats just kill me.

Frog Juice is a fun competive game where players try to collect ingredients for spells. It is a turn based game that is a mix of luck and wit of the player. The artwork on the cards are very enjoyable as well.

The final game I wish I had a picture of is a story telling game. I think it would be cool to play with younger children. The goal of the game, Gloom, is to kill the wretched family of five that you have and kill them in the most miserable ways.
Note, I said miserable not hack and slash gross. You get negative points (good) for making them miserable. You can collect those points when the character is dead.

Example, one of my characters was haunted by ghosts, Beth’s character won the lottery (uh oh, positive points!!), but he got robbed later. Murcia’s character got struck by lightening.
The better you tell a story of how the event on the card occurred, the more hilarious the whole game.
I want to add it to my collection soon.

Do you have a favorite boardgame or cardgame?

Day 188: Xmas Cards

I figure if the stores are going.to have things on the shelves I may as well look.

I found four different card designs that I really liked. Kit and I have very different ideas on what Xmas cards should look like. We typically get two sets. Mailing my cards to my friends and family; mailing Kit’s cards to his friends and family.

The first two selections are my favorite. Simple and two of the few cards available sans glitter. Quite difficult to find in the Walmart selection.

My third favorite says Merry Christmas in bright colors.
And my fourth favorite is a cute little snowman.

I do like snowmen much more Santa Claus on a card. The various renditions of Santa for the most part creep me out. I know that is odd.

Which is your favorite of these four?
Do you have a type of card you love?

I like a single or simpler image while Kit loves the country snow scenes.