Another month, another ATC swap! Artist Trading Cards (ATCs) are small crafts that are freely exchanged between individuals, around the world, usually via snail mail, as an exercise to interact with other artists and experience/collect samples of their work. Basically, you "claim" the most recent participant before you, select one of their listed themes as the subject matter for the card that you'll subsequently make for them, and then post your own preferences for an ATC, so that the next person who comes along can do the same for you.



For Craftster's April 2017 ATC exchange I claimed three women (one of them twice). Detailed below are the cards that I made and the quartet that I received in return!







If you'd like a copy of this ATC paper doll for your own use, I give you permission to print out this sheet to do so, provided that you don't claim it as your own work and/or use it for any sort of profit-making venture. Please note that the wigs are actually helmet-like affairs; I glued another piece of paper behind the hair so that they could be slipped over the head and stay in place--if that's too much work, you could easily just add some paper tabs (like the ones on the garments) to them instead. The white spaces around the body should all be cut out and also make a slit around the top of the woman's hairline where it connects to the green border (look at the back of the card, that I showed you previously, to see what I mean), as those modifications are what allow you to wrap the tabs on the clothes around her limbs/body and slide the wigs down onto her head.







The day after Easter, April 17th, I received a vibrant envelope in the mail, from the same Greybird above, who selected my "The Loch Ness Monster needs about $3.50 ('tree fiddy')" ATC theme. Said phrase was a running joke with Chef's dad on an older episode of the South Park cartoon on Comedy Central. I really liked the pattern on the letter as it suggests autumn foliage to me, even though the shapes aren't leaves (I digitally blurred Greybird's address in the photo for privacy purposes).





Warning:

(Rockingbearranch, another member at Craftster, kindly informed me that the woman in orange is "Divine" from John Water's Pink Flamingos film. I'd never seen or heard of that movie, so, there's no way I would have ever figured that out on my own! Likewise, Greer's doll almost certainly represents Divine as well.)