Reverse Painting ATC

For the recent Foil ATC swap I used a modified version of a technique my great grandfather did in the early 1900’s called reverse-glass-painting. I had a lot of fun doing it and thought I would create a swap just for that.

Here are the steps:

Get a piece of thick plastic. It doesn’t have to be real thick. Just be sure to use something thicker than saran wrap. I used a wrapper from my son’s baseball cards. Use a permanent black marker and trace a design on the plastic or make an original design. just added: A suggestion from one of the participants - was to use a rubber stamp for the outline of the image! Great idea!

Use acrylic (or some other opaque - non see-through) paint and paint some of the design. Generally the opaque part is the ‘background’ but feel free to experiment. For the see-through part - you can use a colored marker - or leave it clear. Let the paint dry.

Cover a 2.5 x 3.5 ATC back with foil - either plain silver foil - or colored foil. (I actually cut some of my foil pieces to fit and glued them right the the plastic side (after it dried!) so they wouldn’t shift. I think an abstract collage of colored foil would have looked cool, too!)

Assemble the ATC. Glue the painted part paint-side down on the foil part, sandwiching the foil between layers.

Frame it - I used glue-backed ribbon - but at the very least use tape around the edges to hold it together. Feel free to add a scrapbook type of frame if you want.

Make 1 ATC for 1 partner. Leave me any questions here or pm me.

Reverse Glass Painting - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverseglasspainting