Embroidered Collage

These ATCs are only the beginning.  I bought a sheet of architectural collage images from ArtChix sized to fit into slides some time back because they intrigued me.  I knew I would probably use them in ATCs and thought about how they would fit with other elements.  Eventually I came up with idea of nesting these photographs into rectangles of greater abstraction.  The idea lingered until I decided that I definitely wanted to try doing some small works in a batch process/pseudo-series format.  I wanted to play with extrapolating pattern from the focal point of the realistic image.

I cut the ATC blanks, then adhered the sixteen slide images in what seemed to be an appropriate position.  I only used the gel medium on the back, in order to make it easier to draw on the surface later.  The next day I extended and echoed lines from the photographs into the rest of the card using markers.  Then, I applied colored pencils, both to fill in the shapes I'd drawn and to add additional information.

I spread the cards out when I was done and started separating them.  I knew I wanted ten of the cards to become part of 5x7 collages.  I bounced around thinking about whether the composition of an individual card was perfect as it was and whether or not I could see ways to extend the patterning into further abstraction.  I ended up discarding one card as not being very good and selected these five to put into my trade folder at www.atcards.com .  You'll be seeing the other ten soon.