Welcome to the fifth episode of Artlab!

Today I’m gonna be showing you something I created that was inspired from a house. A special house. A red cape that I first laid my eyes on two years ago this week. Of course it’s not only a house—it’s my home.

So today my inspiration for the color, shape, and design of the house on my ATC was the 216-year-old cape my family moved into two years ago. The house is a cape cod design. It’s attached to the old barn by what used to be the carriage house. It was where the horses would pull in to get hooked up or unhooked from the buggy before being taken to the stable. But today it’s just part of our house, with a porch on the front.

Buuut, I actually did have another inspiration I used…

This ATC was actually donated to SwapShop to be put in art kits we’re delivering to children’s hospitals. And I love how cute and creative the card is–but it’s so simple! All you need is old magazines and a sharpie.

And did you see the cute little flowers? If you look closely, you can tell that it’s just a circle of magazine page with a quick flower drawn on top. This ATC is a great sample of how to make a simple–yet cute and creative ATC.

Here’s my house-collage ATC…

For my background, all I used was watercolor and salt. For this technique, you’ll want to use more water than you normally would, so the salt will affect the color more. And I actually used two shades of blue, to give the sky more of a realistic color. While it was nice and wet, I scattered table salt all over the paint and let it lay on the ATC until the water had dried, then I just wiped away the salt. (This took about half an hour. While it was drying, I worked on my collage.)

I thought the words on the barn and main house were really cute. And it shows that I enjoy reading!

It did take some time and patience to glue all the little pieces together. But I got it in the end…

To make the roof “pop out” a little more on the ATC, I outlined all the three roofs with a white gel pen. And if you’re using gel pens–keep in mind it will smear if you don’t give it some time to dry… Cause we had some smearing going on :p.

I also added cut-out words from an old magazine to say “home” and a sun on the corner with rays of “light” flowing from it. I made each ray with two lines: black sharpie and white gel pen.

I also added two little doors to the carriage house and the main house and door knobs with a fine sharpie. And similar to the way I outlined the barn roofs with gel pen, I outlined the doors with sharpie .

And that’s my ATC I created this week! I love how much it actually resembles our house, and how much meaning it has to me–even though it’s just magazine pages cut up and glued onto a 2.5″ by 3.5″ card.

Using the same inspiration that I did, my mom also made beautiful ATCs of our house. I love how they’re both of the same thing but look so different, and I love how she depicted two different times of the day.

Her night scene was make with oil pastels. And her day scene was make with watercolor and white crayon resist.

I had a blast making my ATC–I’m definitely going to make more with this technique in the future, and I hope you have as much fun as I did making your own version of a collage ATC.

Will you be making an ATC inspired by your home?