Circus Show - a series by guest Mercy

Greeting VLVS fans!  I’m here today to share with you these super simple and fun to make ATCs that I did.  After watching a documentary on Circuses on Netflix and seeing the trailer for a new dance flick coming out, I was all about doing some performance based ATCs.  I threw in the Mermaid as there was a famous side show that featured “a real mermaid.”  Of course that one was hideous, but I made due with the pretty stamp I had from Viva Las VegaStamps.

Supplies:

Magician Levitating Woman  SKU 18185

Winged Girl Under Umbrella SKU 19116

Mermaid  SKU 17748

Circus Acrobats SKU 17088

Nouveau Torch Lady SKU 17047
Lady Posing SKU 18615

White Cardstock cut into 2.5” X 3.5” ATC cards

Black Pigment ink (in this case I used Color Box)

Black Embossing Powder

Heat Gun

Alcohol Ink Pens [Can substitute any sort of colored pens, paints or pencils you have.]

Distress Ink

Spray Inks with glitter/shimmer

Baby Wipes

Instructions:

After cutting out my ATC cards (2.5” X 3.5”) out of my white cardstock I have hoarded away, I pulled the stamps I wanted to use and stamped one on each blank ATC card with pigment ink.  Most of these were centered.  After stamping was done, black embossing powder was used then heat set.

Once they are embossed, color with your markers of your choice. In this case, alcohol inks were used, but really any sort of pen or pencil will work with varying affects. Whatever you do, however, just keep the coloring super simple and quick. You don’t want to waste a bunch of time coloring, when you will be layering ink over and around these stamped images anyway.

Once they are colored, get out the base ink and one or two of the baby wipes. Lightly spray the distress ink on a craft mat or into the baby wipe and dab the ink around the images. Try to layer on the ink and leave white areas as you gently tap the paper surface with the colored wipe. Once you randomly add that, allow to dry before taking your glimmer sprays and apply those to your cards. What I ended up doing with these was leaving a lot of extra white surface and blending sometimes four different colors. I have on hand these Fireworks sprays and was just playing around the with color combinations.

These were super fun to do and the glimmer sprays on top really make these images pop.