Three of my women for a Women ATC swap

We're having a Women ATC swap on ABC, so I started working on them today.

My initial inclination was to make Vintage/Victorian women for the swap. I got out lace, buttons, old book pages, etc. I was searching for appropriate images when I stumbled across the March/April edition of Somerset Studio and decided to thumb through it for inspiration. Lo and behold, I found the "Stitchy Chix" article by Lisa Bebi on pages 28-31. I had seen this technique before, it wasn't anything new, but I had never tried it. So, I put all the vintage stuff away and found a "slick" magazine. As usual, I had to try a new technique for a swap. Without even seeing if the technique was going to work, I jumped right in.

I gessoed a bunch of women featured in ads, mostly from the waist up. I dry brushed thin gesso onto the images. I don't use expensive gesso, so it didn't completely cover in one coat. I put less gesso on their faces, because I can't draw. By leaving just enough of the faces intact, I was able to see where to put the eyes, eyebrows, noses, ears, and mouths. I used Zig fine point pens on the faces. I was also able to see the outline of the outfits the women were wearing and just followed the lines. I colored them in using watercolor markers. If you use the better quality gesso, you might want to water it down before you begin.

After the gesso dried, I cut the women out. After they were cut out, it was easy to follow the outlines. I used the above mentioned watercolor pencils and Zig pens to color and highlight the images. Now, I didn't do the lovely shading that Bebi did. In the article, she used Golden acrylic paints, so her "Chix" have a chalkier look than I got with my watercolor markers. However, she made hers on large canvases, and mine are for teeny-tiny itsy-bitsy ATCs, which limited the size of the women and the amount of embellishments I could use.

Although I prefer to make every one of my swap pieces the same, I have made them all similar. They all have the same funky background and texture paste applied using punchinella as the stencil. The faces and outfits are all different, though. I have all the women finished, just not turned into ATCs. I'll try to finish and show the rest later.