Sunday, February 3, 2008

My ATC Brown Paper Background

Well good day all. Here's my Brown Paper Background so far:
You can see there, just above 6:00 and at 8:00, two coins - Pondsong's idea from the comments on February 1st - but these are paper copies of coins, the brown paper was too thick to take a rubbing which was my first alternative idea to her idea of putting real coins on the paper. Here is the sheet of coins that I copied, I have got Chinese yuan, Greek drachma, Italian lira, Canadian dollars, I think that those are UK 5pence, and some US half dollars. I adore holding coins - even more than paper money ... silly me ... (well, I'd rather just invest those) ...anyway, those heavy round clunks that they make together. Big beads.

These are paper ones.

I would like to show you some of the ATC's that I have made to date:


The one on the right has an image from an old book of postal stamps that I enlarged a lot. It is shiny with acrylic gloss medium on it as both glue and finish. The one on the left is drawn with markers on watercolor paper.This one also has acrylic medium on it, with stickers - the houses - and sticky letters. I get outraged at the CEO's of corporations who spill their pollution everywhere. Though here I am using plastic gel meduim and plastic coated stickers... sigh ...These two are from a series on trauma. I was thinking that when people are first coming out of a traumatic event - international terrorism, natural catastrophies, domestic violence, any of it, that it is tough to gather the brain power to even ask for help. So I got to thinking about what we all can do to help each other. These cards were one background at first, painted/drawn with Portfolio brand oil pastels - think watercolor pencils, only lusher! I worked on pretty heavy weight watercolor paper, and when the painting was done it looked like a storm at sea. Good background for trauma recovery theme. I cut the painting into regulation ATC sizes and added words. The big letters are stick on, and the handwriting was done in permanent marker.

I went to the funeral, yesterday, of a woman who was a remarkable teacher on the subject of trauma recovery. For years she taught, well, life skills to people who had not managed to learn them elsewhere, things as basic as how to hold a conversation and make it true. Bitsa taught us how to see the child of "God" in everyone, even ourselves. She just pointed a whole lot of us in the correct general direction. May I just say, here, Goddess Bless Bitsa Hoag Turner and her family in this time of transition. My love to you all.

And here are the Guardians, corporeal images of the ones which make it possible for us each to find what we need. Thank you.

(Here's a fun link as a treat for your inner - or outer - child: http://countdown.tentwostudios.com )