A few years ago, I put together a single-sheet zine as a sample for my students in my ‘Make the World Your Art Gallery’ workshop. Mostly, I was demonstrating different techniques for zines, especially using torn-paper elements in them. It’s not an absolutely fabulous zine, and it’s not even much about art. I simply grabbed…
Category: Art in the Mail
Art in the mail – snail mail and email: Zines, artistamps, mailart, digital art, swaps, and more.
Zine Layouts
I published my first zine in 1977. It was one piece of paper, printed on one or two sides, folded, stamped, and sent out with someone’s name & address written on the outside. In time, I graduated to two or three sheets of paper, and I started rubber stamping & glittering my zines. Yes, each…
Zine Basics
For years, I was the list moderator for the botmzines group/list at Yahoo!Groups, I decided to throw together some pages about zines. For starters, the “botmzines” name came from the group that inspired it, the Book Of The Month list… BOTM. So, although botmzines swaps aren’t on any specific calendar, the group started with that…
ATC Tutorial 4 – Memories – Finishing the ATC
Continued from ATC Tutorial 3 – Memories – Giving it meaning The card was very nearly finished. I liked the colors and the general design of the image, but it needed just a little… something else. I didn’t know what, yet. This is the part of the process that can take forever, since it’s trial…
ATC Tutorial 3 – Memories – Giving it meaning
Continued from ATC Tutorial 2 – Memories – Adding More Layers At this point, the card was pretty… but it had no real theme or meaning to it. And, while “pretty” art can stand on its own merits, I rarely choose to make art without another layer of meaning. So, I started examining the card…
ATC Tutorial 2 – Memories – Adding more layers
To reflect the sky colors in the water, I made a duplicate layer of the sky, flipped it vertically in Edit–>Transform. I reduced its transparency to 36%, and slightly adjusted the color to make it greener (for the influence of the green of the water) and darker. I remembered my painting lessons which taught me…
ATC Tutorial 1 – Memories – Digital ATC
This is page one of a free tutorial showing you how to make a digital ATC similar to “Memories,” the artist trading card shown below. How the card started: I wanted to make a different card… something not quite so “ghost-y” as some of my other ATCs from mid-2005. I was also thinking about some…
Midnight in New Orleans – ATC
The idea for this started with an illustration in Photoshop Secrets of the Pros showing an eerie, monochromatic image by Joen Asmussen. The clouds in the sky of that image inspired me to try a similar effect, using some of my own graphics. I started with a public domain photo of a solar eclipse, courtesy…
Memories – A Digital ATC
This card was designed to document the creative process when I’m working on digital ATCs. I’ve written four pages–with thumbnail images of each step–to explain how I work on these cards. It shows you how to go from initial idea to finished card. This card, with documentation and HTML work, took about three and a…
Reality/Imagination – A free poster and Artist Trading Card (ATC)
Free art! This is one of many Artist Trading Cards (ATCs) that you can print from my Aisling.net website. This card has been so popular, you can also print it as a free mini-poster, about 5″ x 7″. I was working with photos of smoke. I wanted to see if I could “lift” the smoke…