ATC Shading Tutorial

I have had a little break from blogging - partly because November is National Novel Writing Month - see the official NaNoWriMo website for more details about that. Suffice it to say that November is a mad month where you write 1667 words of fiction every night until you have a 50,000 word manuscript which becomes the first draft of a novel. This I did, and my sanity was much affected.



But I won. For those interested in the gruesome details, my novel is about Melburnian vampires, and was tremendously fun to write, and most likely incredibly dreary to read. Long may it languish in a drawer.

A little while ago, someone asked for a tutorial on how I shade my ATCs. Here's a step by step guide to how that happens for me. There's lots of ways to achieve this effect, and the more you play around with it, the more you get a feeling for your own style. In the (misquoted) words of Captain Barbossa, these aren't rules, they're more like guidelines.

First of all, cut out your figures and play around with them on the background. Look for interesting crops; set the images off-centre or only use part of it. These backgrounds are made from the newspaper that covers my work mat and gets covered in lots of random colours. When the paper is caked with paint, I stamp randomly all over it with a text stamp. This newspaper is from 2005, that's how long it's been accumulating paint and texture. It's all lovely and nubbly from the layers of colour.


I paste the newspaper over 300gsm watercolour paper with gel medium. Newspaper has some stretch in it, so it moulds around the edges of the card, too. See those little splashes of aqua that have randomly shown through the magenta? I would never create something like that. It has to be a happy accident.


While you at it, sponge the edges of the images with butterscotch ink - it takes away the white outline of the paper the image is printed on and helps it to blend with the backgound better.


When I've decided where the image is going to go, I make a highlighted area, using a sponge and some paint in a complementary colour. At the moment, I'm fond of using stencils to make interesting shapes which the image will lie over.


I've made these stencils by using my shape cutter to cut holes in glossy card. I'm hoping the glossy card will last a bit longer than more porous card, but these are really not permanent fixtures. I'm hoping they last at least as long as my current faddish interest in stencilling does.


While I'm stencilling the shapes, I also sponge around the edge of the card to start building a border of sorts. I'll flesh that border out later with my pastel pencils. I stencil with a latex sponge, and I'm using acrylic paint. This is red-violet acrylic paint, and it's more translucent than most acrylics, but that suits me for now. It's quite violently vibrant, too, but that suits the lavish, faux-Middle Eastern imagery I'm using.


Now I grab a text stamp and stamp with a contrasting, eye-catching colour over the shape. I'm using a Wordsworth stamp, and Galaxy Gold Brilliance ink.


See how I've stamped right over the shape without worrying about the text overlapping? Because it's gold, and fairly transparent, it vanishes into nothing against the mad, multicoloured background. That's sneaky and lazy, but it works better than using a mask, which can leave a little outline around your shape.


Now I grab a magenta pastel pencil, and use it to outline the shape, and the frame of the ATC. This is like using eyeshadow - you start with the lightest colours and move through to the darkest colours. At least that's how I do it. Smudge the pastel colour with your finger or a paper stump, which is one of those nifty little art tools that can save you from wearing out your finger when working over a large area.


Then grab a darker colour - I'm using black because it suits my palette, but you could use brown or navy or something else. Run a line around the edge of your shape to highlight it further and to add dimension.


Now wave good bye to the card with the door-shape, because this is the last you'll see of it. Shortly after this I made a bad artistic decision with a white gel pen, far too shameful to show to the public. The white gel pen is my private shame.


Now it's time to past your image down. See how using half the image is much more effective than putting the whole figure in the centre of the card? If I were making a lot of these for a swap, I'd crop the image before I printed it, to save on ink and paper. There's no sense in printing out her legs twelve times if you're only going to cut them off. Cut them off in the design stage - she won't know anything about it.


So, after looking at the image for a while, I decided that she looked as though she had just gotten out of her beautiful bed, ready for a new and exciting day. So I took my gold gel pen and drew some sun rays coming off the half-circle, and stamped some letters onto thin gold paper. I used the black pencil to give shadow to one side of the sunbeam, too. The shape of the stencil and the woman's figure gave the card a theme. Sometimes this goes very well, and sometimes there is the private shame of the white gel pen.


Last of all, I use my paintbrush to create a thin, raised edge of gold paint - it's not straight or perfect, but it suits the organic colour of the card. You can see that the gold text I stamped on the semi-circle is almost all covered up - that wasn't intentional, but it still has a presence on the card.
And there she is:

Chiffon sandwich, hold the chiffon

This instructional post is entirely inspired by Annette Husband, who posted an fantastic tutorial on Inkjet water transfers that I'm planning to try this weekend. I wanted to post my own tutorial on using fabric scraps and a heat gun to make embellishments.

I've been making embellishments from glitzy stuff trapped between layers of chiffon, stitching the layers then burning them back with a heat gun. I've seen this technique in Cloth, Paper, Scissors and in Maggie Grey's books.

This particular sandwich isn't actually chiffon, and I didn't like the way it burned - instead of cracking and shrinking, it went more fluid and blobby. It was an experiment, and I've learned from it. I'll still be using these pieces, in this case, for a 3D fabric box I'm working on, but in the future, I'll stick to chiffon. Or do more test burns.

I iron a layer of vliesofix to each piece of fabric, then sprinkle one side with lots of glitzy stuff. It's the time to dig out all those really garish brightly coloured stuff I love to stash but can never use tastefully: glitter, lurex threads, shimmery fabric scraps, sequins. I especially like to use the big, cheap, multicoloured sequins, because they melt into amorphous jewel-like puddles of colour.


Because the vliesofix is slightly tacky, gold leaf adheres to it pretty well; if it doesn't, a quick whiz with the heat gun will soften the glue enough. This is an extreme close up of what's in this sandwich: snippets of foiled tulle, sparkly yarn, sequins, and red/gold leaf flakes.



Then you press the layers together, and iron them (under a sheet of baking paper), with an iron that's warm enough to seal the vliesofix together, but not so hot that it makes your sheer fabric shrink or buckle. We'll save that fun for later. In this picture, you can see the glitzy stuff trapped between the two layers of sheer fabric.


Then I stitch the layers together - as the fabric shrinks, it clings to the stitching, and leaves an aged, crumbly residue. (Or in this case, slightly blobby.) I've stitched one piece in a grid with a butterscotch-toned variegated cotton thread. The thread needs to be cotton, or something non-synthetic that will stand up to the heat-gun.


And in this section, I've stitched a spoked wheel. I've found that the smaller the gaps between the stitching, the more structure the final piece will have, which is why my wheel has an inner and an outer circle. You could do all sorts of motifs this way, and the best thing is that they look better if you don't stitch nice, tidy lines. (This is good for me, because I'm a wobbly driver on the sewing machine.)


Now, the fun and destructive part. The first thing you need to do is open the doors and windows, because this is like burning plastic; it's smelly and the fumes could be toxic. So, make sure there's lots of ventilation. I heat from the middle of the grid out, holding my heat gun as close as I would for melting UTEE, moving the hottest part around the area I'm heating. You really see the purpose of the grid when the fabric is twisting and melting and pulling away from the lines of stitching: it holds the piece in shape, and ends up as the skeleton of the fabric. Here's my grid melted, with all the shiny treasures revealed:


And in close-up:


And the wheel, still in the framework of supporting stitches:



And all my wheels, snipped away from their frames:

The sheer fabric I used for these didn't shrink as much as chiffon does - if you're using chiffon, you should expect your piece to shrink by a third. As a consequence, my wheels were too big for what I wanted, which was to be medallions on the faces of a five-sided fabric box with a steam-punk theme. Never mind! I'm going to snip out tiny squares from my large grid, and stitch them to my fabric box, and embed lots of multicoloured beads into the gridwork. The wheels will keep for another project. I think they'll look great over black velvet. (Oh, velvet! Why can't I quit you?)