Artist trading cards (ATCs) can spark off whole new realms of creativity for many reasons. One reason is that they are very cheap to make, and if you’re not happy with a result, then you have wasted very little material and probably not a lot of time.

One of the main advantages is the lack of fear in having another go at a different art card - unlike, for example, trying to get started on a large, white expanse of watercolor paper – which takes some courage. The thought of ruining all that expensive paper is enough to put anyone off!

With ATCs you can cut a whole stack of blank pieces of paper (or whatever material you’re using as your base) and have the next one ready to use as soon as you’ve finished with the current one, whether you’ve finished with it happily or unhappily.

One of the first cards I ever made was handwritten. I then embellished it. I do everything on the computer these days, so it was an interesting exercise to find how differently I felt about something I’d written by hand.

I had written: ‘I am Creative’ one way across the card and ‘Creativity is me’ the other way across the card. (I’m not even slightly worried about grammar in these exercises…) The spaces around the words were filled with stars, dogs’ paw prints (I love dogs), exclamation marks to show I meant it, and bubbles. Bubbles have to be joyous. Then I drew a frame around the edge of the card because that seemed to make it more definitely a statement of fact – I AM Creative. Oh, yes!

When I know how to do it, I shall come back to this article and put in a picture of that art card for you to see. In the meantime, why not try it yourself – get some colored pens, crayons, lipstick, whatever you fancy, and a piece of card, watercolor paper, sugar paper… – cut out a 2.5” x 3.5” piece and write ‘I am Creative’ on it. Don’t think too much about it, just do it and take it from there. You might be surprised what you end up with, and it could be the start of your own art card collection, whilst at the same time the beginning of a whole new stream of creativity.

You don’t even have to believe it to write it. Just write it and you will come to believe it.

Sometimes when I’m feeling a bit low and things aren’t flowing naturally, I take out that handwritten card and just looking at it seems to put me in the ‘Creativity is me’ zone.

In the months to come, we will create more art cards (painting, origami, clay, cartoon etc), both for their own sake and as springboards for other creative projects. Any ATC can lead onto larger pieces of work – either because you’ve ‘practiced’ the individual items that make up a larger work on your ATCs - which then make good pictures by themselves - or because you scale up the size of the ATC you’ve made.

You might not need an ‘I am Creative’ card – I have other cards that say: ‘I will not eat cake today’, ‘I will ring a friend today’ and ‘I WILL smile today’, amongst many other cryptic messages to myself.

Yours Creatively

Susan