My Favorite Things: Artist Trading Cards (ATCs)

When I first began exploring art again in my late 30s, I was short on materials and unwilling to spend a lot for supplies on what I was not certain would be anything but a passing interest. I found myself wasting a lot of paint and paper as I attempted to learn new techniques and improve my skills. The truly "failed" art would wind up in the trash, and after several expensive "lessons" of this variety, I decided to scale down in my projects in an attempt to preserve supplies and save money.

I was familiar with Artist Trading Cards (ATCs) and also ACEOs from my time on Etsy.com. I bought a beautiful set of ACEOs from one artist, and it got me thinking about what I was trying to accomplish.

For those not familiar with ATCs (which are also a popular format with scrapbookers in addition to artists), they are essentially miniature works of art roughly the size of a baseball card or playing card (which some artists even use as their "canvas"), done in just about any medium, designed to be traded and collected among artists. Some artists have also commercialized this concept with the creation of Art Cards Editions and Originals (ACEOs), which are just ATCs that have a price tag on them. Wikipedia has a great entry that gives some background on the history and philosophy of ATCs and ACEOs and I'll let those who are interested read more over there.

As it turned out, the small size of ATCs were a great format for beginner artists. I was mainly doing watercolors at the time, and with the help of a set of miniature brushes, I was able to create very fine details, even with my rudimentary skills. I began experimenting with other techniques like pen and ink, collaging of two paintings on a single card, and with a synthetic type of paper called Yupo. Yupo is still one of my favorite materials, because it's basically a thin sheet of plastic that doesn't absorb the paint, which makes for some interesting effects as the paint dries. Plus if I really screwed up, I just gave it a quick rinse in the sink and started over. No waste, no worry.

I joined a Yahoo group of active ATC makers and traders and did a few swaps with other folks around the country. Some of my favorite ATCs that I created are actually no longer in my possession, as I've swapped them for cool ATCs by other folks. Here are a few I did that I really liked (click on any image for a larger view--remember, these are actually quite small in real life):

"Golden Orb," watercolor on Yupo, traded

Untitled, inspired by Klimt, watercolor on paper, traded (this one took
three hours to make with tiny micro-brushes)

"Lila and Lou," watercolor and ink on Yupo, traded

"The Dreamers of the Dreams," watercolor and ink on paper

"The Passengers," watercolor and ink on Yupo

"There it Goes," watercolor and ink on Yupo, traded
(the background here is a good example of some of the interesting
effects Yupo can produce)

"What They Saw," watercolor and ink on Yupo

I will also show you a few of the cards I received in trade (and one I purchased), all of which I treasure:

Clockwise starting from the top: "October Kitties," digital ATC by Cynthia Peck; "Daydreaming," mixed media ACEO, artist's name illegible; "Squidlicious," mixed media ATC by Melody Hansen-Herman; "Ornate 002" pen and marker ATC by Marissa Childers; "Seven-Day Forecast" mixed media ATC by Carolyn Dickson

Want to learn more or give it a try yourself?  First, know that you do not have to paint or draw to be able to make amazing cards. Collaging, stamping, sewing, cut/paste/glue, printing of digital images you Photoshopped and manipulated, etc. are all allowable and make for some amazing cards. Do a Google image search or visit Flickr for more ideas, plus here's a Wikihow that will help you get started. There's also a great book called Artist Trading Card Workshop by Bernie Berlin that is full of creative and cool projects you can try on your own. ATCs are also lots of fun for children, if you are looking for an art/craft projects for the kids in your life.

If any of you get started making your own cards and wanna swap, let me know.  :-)

My Favorite Things: The Tek Bracelet

This is my most-worn piece of jewelry after my wedding ring, which makes it one of My Favorite Things. I call it the Tek Bracelet.

"Tek" is short for Tekla, and Tekla was Tekla Allen, a family friend since I was a child. She was always called Tek for as long as I knew her, which I found strange as a child, though I found the fact that it was a nickname for "Tekla" even stranger. Tekla was one of those names like Opal and Edna and Ethel that children of the 1970s would encounter only on grandmothers and great aunts.

Tek is from the small town where I grew up, and she was an amazing woman. She married well, to a local pharmacist who also owned his drugstore which, incredibly, still had an operating lunch counter through the early 1980s. (I assure you it was quaint even back then.) They had a nice 1950s-era ranch home filled with original mid-century modern furnishings. Antiques at that time still trended toward the Victorian and the Depression eras. The nice Danish modern stuff Tek had was considered too recent and unfashionable in the late 1970s when she became a widow and sold the house and much of its furnishings to move into a senior apartment complex. I'm sure a lot of it went for a steal and oh, how people including my parents would pay through the nose for that stuff today!

I met Tek when she was still incredibly spry for a woman in her 60s--one whose mother was still alive, living independently in her late 80s and almost equally spry. Tek still dressed to the nines, wearing little heels and stockings, with scores of handbags and incredible jewelry. Lots of chunky bracelets, big bead strands and pendants and fancy clip-on earrings. I saw pictures of Tek from the 1950s, doing upper-middle-class housewife-ly things like shopping downtown and attending charity social events. She was always wearing fox pieces, little hats and white gloves.  Style was important to her and seemed to come naturally to her.

She gave birth to one son who was also a friend of my parents (and much closer to their age), which is how we all met Tek. The son died young--at just 42--of MS, but Tek was such a neat lady that her daughter-in-law would continue to take care of her for the rest of her life, even though they were no longer related and even after she had married a second husband. Tek moved to live near them when she got older and eventually moved in with them when she was in her 80s.

By chance, her death happened just a few days before I had planned a visit home. I lived hours away by that time and I don't know if I would have driven home to attend the funeral, but I was happy it worked out that I could attend. My mom was helping the ex-daughter-in-law clear out some of Tek's things after her death, and the woman sent home with her a big bag of costume jewelry from one of Tek's many jewelry boxes.

We each picked a few pieces and wore them to Tek's funeral the next day, to honor her. The Tek Bracelet is one of the pieces I chose.

I wore it (and still wear it) often and it always brings complements. It goes with any outfit and adds a touch of class to even t-shirts and jeans. The bracelet is not a precious metal and appears to be stainless steel. It has no brand markings on it but is probably something like Sarah Coventry or Avon or something that would have been sold at the local department store. It has a spring hinge and is actually a little snug on me since I gained weight, though it still fits. It would probably fit as an armband on a skinny-armed person. I like the design so much I considered getting an armband tattoo of it at one point.

My mom saw how often I wore it and when she later found a yellow gold-toned equivalent at a garage sale, she bought it for me.

I like and wear both pieces, though I don't wear yellow gold jewelry very often.  And of course, the yellow gold-toned bracelet is not the Tek Bracelet, so it's less special.

My Favorite Things: "Phantom of the Paradise"

Welcome to another episode of My Favorite Things.

This week, I'll share a corny movie that many of you have probably not heard of and have never seen, even though it was written and directed by an esteemed and well-established Hollywood figure, Brian de Palma.

This film is "Phantom of the Paradise."  (It is available via Amazon Instant Video for those interested.)

I first caught this on cable sometime in the mid-1990s, when I was home from work with the flu. At the time, I thought I had vague memories of it from the 1970s--either on TV or from reading about it in a magazine, but I would have been young and certainly didn't recall most of it if I had in fact seen it.

I was struck immediately by the sets, costumes, music and gore, all of which are ridiculously over-the-top and were presumably meant to be that way.  (Or not? It was early in de Palma's film career.) It was all very 1970s tacky and was hopelessly out-of-date at the time I was watching it, even thought he 1970s were very much cycling back around in the 1990s, in terms of fashion and music influence.

The sets were decorated by a then-unknown Sissy Spacek, and the music--all written and mostly sung by Paul Williams, who also stars as the film's sex symbol [yes!] and bad guy--was nominated for an Oscar.  My favorite performance was Gerrit Graham as Beef, in a deliciously campy send-up of 1970s glam rockers.

I watched the movie repeatedly during the two months it ran on cable.  Then I forgot about it.

Then it made the rounds on cable again in the late 1990s, and my obsession was born. This time I shared it with a few others, some of whom agreed with me that it was a masterpiece of kitsch.  (Some found it boring and ridiculous, of course.)

A friend bought me my first VHS cassette of it in the early 2000s. It was one of the first DVD's I bought when we upgraded to the new technology. Another friend made me a copy of the soundtrack from Napster (the soundtrack was not available in the US at that time and was obtainable only as a very expensive Japanese import).

And upon surfing the web, I was delighted to discover I am not the only person who thinks this movie is fantastic. It is a "midnight movie" that plays in a lot of places (kind of like Rocky Horror Picture Show) and there are websites devoted to it, annual fan conventions, highly-detailed reconstructions of the Phantom costume for sale, etc.

I actually got a chance to see it in a theater at the Dundee when we lived in Omaha, where it played as a midnight movie in October 2007. To my surprise, Mr. 42 and I were NOT the only people in the theater. There was a reasonably-sized crowd in attendance, possibly because the movie stars and contains the music of Paul Williams, who was born and raised in a suburb of Omaha.

I will admit it looked a lot cheaper and cheesier on the big screen than on my TV, and the film reel they had was in pretty bad shape, but it was still fun to see it in its original format, with popcorn.

The pièce de resistance in my Phantom collection is the original movie poster from the 1970s release, which Mr. 42 found for me at an antique store that was going out of business. It was professionally framed and marked down from $179 to $139 in the close-out sale. That's probably more than I would have paid, but it was wonderful to receive such a thoughtfully-chosen gift, and its bright colors and cheesy graphics have graced the living rooms of four different apartments now.  

My Favorite Things: Blue Cat Painting

I just read the annual O The Oprah Magazine edition with "Oprah's Favorite Things."

Why do we care about Oprah's favorite things and how she found them? Most of them are things I can't afford, even if I like them (and there's an awful lot in it that I don't like. I mean, sure, if she wanted to give them to me it might be a different story ...)

I have a lot of my own favorite things already. Most of them were not expensive. Some were gifts. Some probably technically aren't "things" but I won't split hairs. I thought I would share them with you from time to time, and I would love to hear about your favorite things, too.

Here's an easy one that many of you have probably already seen, if you ever visited my house in Lincoln or any of my apartments in Omaha.

One of my favorite things is this Blue Cat Painting.  I informally refer to it as "Chess," sort of short for "Cheshire Cat," though this picture isn't exactly of the Cheshire Cat. Just a grinning cat, really.

I found him at an antique/craft mall on Cornhusker Highway in Lincoln back in 1997. He was $35. We had just bought our house and some new furniture to put in it, and we were pretty broke after that, but he was perfect for the decor in our guest bedroom and I couldn't get him out of my head.  We were getting ready for our house-warming party and I just knew I had to have him.  I emptied out my spare change jar, which had almost $30 in it, and scraped together a few more bucks to go get him.

(I put the change in my bank account and did NOT actually pay for him with the almost $30 in pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters, LOL!)

He was displayed in the bathroom at my three Omaha apartments, and is in the bathroom here in Philly as well. I had good luck finding a semi-matching shower curtain that further emphasizes his blueness.

Chess is large and heavy--2' by 3', professionally framed with a wooden frame and thick glass.  He is a watercolor painting with pen-and-ink details. Artist unknown. If it is signed, it's either on the back of the painting or under the frame where I can't see it. The bright blue frame is totally part of the painting's appeal for me. It matches the blue of the cat so perfectly.

The painting has just three colors in it, and most of the shadows and values are created by crosshatch lines. You can see some drips, streaks, brushmarks, etc. on him. The paper is not as white as it used to be, but the colors are still vivid.

I used to dislike the color blue, but this picture helped me learn to appreciate it, and I now have a number of blue things in my home, some of which you  may see in future editions of My Favorite Things.