June Albuquerque ATC Swap

Yesterday at Rhonda's this month's ATC theme was "Colors" and there were some amazing and varied ATCs for swapping in, of course, all kinds of colors! There was photography, fabric and beading, and collage techniques I hadn't seen before. Here's what my contribution looked like:

The poem I used is by Izumi Shikibu, classical Japanese woman poet translated by Kenneth Rexroth in One Hundred Poems from the Japanese. It reads:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Out of the darkness
on a dark path,
I now set out.
Shine on me,
moon of the mountain edge.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This month's swap kind of snuck up on me but I was determined to make something since I had to miss the last one. So I ended up doing the backgrounds during my lunch hour -- I used 2 sheets of card stock, and long, torn strips of scrapbooking paper across the sheets horizontally. (Did you know if you tear the paper from the front, you'll get a white edge? And if you tear from the back, you won't. I made the snow-capped mountains just by tearing from the front.) Then I cut them down to size. You only get 8 cards out of a sheet this way (as opposed to 10) but I think it was quite a timesaver to do the whole background at once (it took about 20 minutes to do each full sheet).

At home I printed out the poem on a couple of sheets from my stash of vintage drafting vellum. I love the way the glue (PVA) makes it even more transparent, so it really interacts with the background colors. I burned the edges with a stick of incense. I might have gotten a little carried away, but things sure smelled good when I was done!

I doodled in the moons with my new clickable white out pen, and it looked ok, but I think I'm not happy unless there's a bit of sparkle, so I dabbed on some interference gold paint by Golden. Then I darkened the edges with black and brown solvent ink.