Altered Playing Cards, Week 23: Masks

For Week 23, Claudine at Claudine's Art Corner used masks with her APCs.  Now I have NO dies, and no way to make anything even similar to what Claudine made, but I DO know how to use a mask.  I've even made a few of my own, which is easy if you have some packing tape and are able to tape both sides of the image you are using.  I also stamp extra images, cut them to size, then use these as masks.  So, although mine won't look anything like Claudine's, I will still use masks to create this week's APCs.

I started by painting the slightly gessoed playing cards with a light color, but the pale yellow didn't cover as well as I'd hoped.  You were still able to see the Tasmanian Devil image beneath the paint.  So, I added the darker color to hide the card's original image.

I used the masks to determine placement before I began altering the cards.  I was a bit surprised that I had not cleaned the head, because I always try to clean my stamps before I put them away.

Leaving the silhouette mask in place, I stamped the bird directly on the playing card. 

With both the bird mask and the head mask in place, I applied the second color acrylic paint using a paint brush.

I returned the bird mask to the stamp, where I knew it would be the next time I needed it.  I had originally (a LONG time ago) applied a product called Wacky Tac to it, so it stays in place when I apply the mask.

For the second card, I didn't get a very good image because I couldn't find my acrylic block.  I tried to stamp the image without any support.  It was a disaster because I have the same Wacky Tac on the back of the rubber stamp, and the Wacky Tac stuck to my hand when I tried to lift the stamp from the playing card.  Live and learn.

Not much I can do now, though, because I have no backup cards I can use when things don't go right.  So it was time to add the mask

and stamp the foreign text stamp on the card.  When I removed the mask, I was quite pleased.

For the "head" altered card on the left, I outlined the image using a red ink pen.  Not sure if I helped or hindered it.

The "bird" playing card was even worse.  When I tried to add words, the white pen Claudine sent me when I won her first giveaway, cut through the blue paint and the quote was scratched onto the original card.  It reads "A bird on the head," although I had planned to add "is worth two in the hair."  If only I had taken time to computer generate the text, this would have been a much better card.

Thankfully, there are only four more weeks and these will be finished.  Thanks for visiting, especially because, as with most weeks I have NONE of the products Claudine uses.  As always, your comments mean the world to me.