Salmon Series ATCs or Recuse Remedy for Bad Art.

Salmon Series ATC and how I got there.  This is a rescue from an old watercolour painting I did when I was learning.  I was told never to throw out bad art because you can learn from your mistakes.  One of the things I learned was that you can keep a thing forever and it still doesn't get better.  So I decided to collage over it and make some ATCs from it.  Here is my process.

The original disaster.  I've gotten better but we all have to learn somewhere. 

First I tore up some pages from an old dictionary and glued them right on top of the piece.  Good bye flowers.

Next I took a couple of salmon carvings I did for printing and added them on top of the torn paper.

Flowers?  I don't see any flowers.

The salmon printing was a bit too bold over the other layers so I decided to soften the look with pastels. I love working with pastels.  I use both soft and hard but for this project I used soft. 

I liked how the pastels looked but still wanted to add more to the piece.  I had no idea what I would end up with when I was done. 

This is the mesh from some Mandarin Oranges I bought last winter.  I used the mesh as a stencil and added purple ink all over.  It was a subtle addition but I liked what it achieved. 

After the purple ink but it still needed something more.

So I watered down some acrylic folk art style paint and used a Dixie cup to make circles all over the top.  I selected purple and beige paint.  Purple to stand out and beige to soften.

Now I liked how it was turning out.  There is almost no hint of the original painting.

I rubbed in a bit more soft pastel to bring the colours forward again. 

Now the fun part.  I took it to my cutter and without plan, I cut  as many ATCs as I could get,  which turned out to be 14.  There were some scrap pieced left which I cut into Inchies.  Two for one art. How perfect is that?

Now I just needed to do the edges with ink and sign, date and label the backs. 

These are the finished ATCs from my Salmon series of 14.  I'd already given some away before this pic.