Altered Playing Card swaps

I have participated in 4 altered playing card ATC swaps through swap bot, one for each suite of cards. The last two are clubs and diamonds, which I finished up this weekend. Here are the Clubs cards:

I used  a set of Russian playing cards as my bases so that’s why they look slightly different than your average playing cards. Also they are not the standard ATC size, which this swap required, so I needed to mount them on a coordinating piece of cardstock. I used two colors of acrylic (el cheapo brand) for the swirly painted background. Then for the face cards I used a glaze of the two paints on the text pages and blotted it off with a paper towel. You can’t see in the picture, but you can actually still  read the text and it gives it this nice leather-like texture. For the other 6 cards, I just used the Tim Holtz distress inks (I think it was Tea Dye color) direct to paper. Then I misted them with water and heat set them to get that nice aged look. I don’t speak any French, so they don’t make any sense, but I loved trying to pick out sentences from the French pages. It was SOOOO much fun. Oh, once the paint was dry, I used a spray matte fixative to keep the paint from rubbing off when I painted them with ModPodge. Once that was dry, I modpodged them twice and heat set. They now have a nice smooth finish and the text isn’t trying to peel off.

And here are the diamonds:

For these, I used the same set of playing cards, just a different suite. Don’t the face cards look so exotic? I got them from Sky Blue Pink. They’re great for playing cards; they have all different kinds! Anyway, since these playing cards are naturally glossy (as are most that I’ve come across), I used alcohol inks on them. The first cards use a combination of the ginger, latte, and caramel colors. The second ones use the stream, and some others from that set. But it was the ink that was left on my blending pad from the last time I used that color combination. I didn’t add any new inks, just some new blending solution, because I wanted it to be a muted purple color. Then after I did those, I added some more greenish blue (I think it’s the stream color) to the pad to make the blue green stand out more. That’s how I did the last three.  The images are just stamps on foreign text pages. Then I cut them out and used water colors to paint them. I didn’t seal these since there isn’t much danger of the alcohol ink coming off later.

I really like how both sets of these turned out. Funny, when I was making them yesterday, I thought I liked the clubs more, but now looking at them today I think I’m more partial to the diamonds. Isn’t it interesting how a nights sleep can change our perceptions?