ATC Swap: Birds

I joined an Artist's Trading Card swap on www.splitcoaststampers.com. It is called PAT (Pick-A-Topic) am in a group of 5 people. Each person selects a topic; in my group, they were birds, cardinals, owls, blue footed boobies, and emus (that was mine). The other people will make Emu cards for me. I made one of each of the other four topics for the other participants. Here are my finished cards:

The gal who selected the blue footed booby originally selected the topic "parkour," but on realizing that the rest of the group selected birds, she changed it to the blue footed booby. I couldn't resist combining the two, so this booby can really move. I found the many photographs of boobies kicking up their legs to display their beautiful blue feet very convenient. I was also excited to use the flat bed train car from the original set of freight train themed rubber stamps, which I had made some years back. I'm still enjoying those trains, and considering making other designs.

I stylized photographs of birds, and changed them to black and white in Adobe Photoshop.  I found Image->Adjust->Black and White very useful, but to make it really only black and white, rather than grayscale (I wanted a rubber stamp look), I converted the image to indexed color, and specified that I only wanted black and white. I adjusted the dithering until I could see the right amount of dotted detailing. I printed and cut out the images (using my Silhouette cutter for some of them), and then colored the results with Copic markers.

The beads of course are stitched on. I really enjoyed working with the glass rings in the peacock. You'll be seeing those again. For the backs of the cards, I printed an image on acetate, and glued it over printed cardstock.