Paper Towel Backgrounds on ATCs

These ATCs were made for the June swap over on Junk Journals and Mindful Mixed Media Art.  The prompt was the letter R.  As always, I only used Claritystamp stamps and stencils for my ATC projects. 
For a change, I decided to use paper towel mop up sheets for the background of each ATC.  Usually, I stamp and colour directly onto the precut ATC cards (2.5" x 3.5") which I have in my stash, but I am glad that I added a background first as I love the way that these turned out.

For the first ATC, R is for Roses, I had a piece of paper towel which had been used to clean Distress Oxides off two Claritystamp stencils used for a previous project (see HERE).  One of the stencils is of a rose, so it was perfect for this ATC.  The top layer of paper towel was added to the ATC, sealed with matte medium, dried and trimmed.

NDC stamp #123 was stamped onto a piece of scrap card in Jet Black Archival ink and cut out using the Direct Cut feature on my Brother Scan N Cut.

This was coloured using my Kuretake Clean Colour pens (only 6 were used) and added to the ATC.  The Caput Mortuum Big Brush marker from Faber Castell was then used to add a shadow down the left hand side and along the bottom of the ATC.

Finally, the upper case R from the Word Chain Alphabet was stamped in Onyx Black Versafine ink and heat embossed in clear EP.  The rest of the sentiment was added using one of the Everyday Micron pens by Sakura.

For the second ATC, R is for Robins, I used a piece of paper towel that had cleaned up Amsterdam acrylic inks as a background.  This was added to the ATC in the same way as the first.

I had intended to use white embossing powder when adding the robins from the Christmas Carol 2 stamp set, however I used clear over black ink by mistake.  OOPS - Outstanding Opportunity Presenting Suddenly as Carolyn Dube would say.  Rather than start again, I remelted the embossing powder several times adding white EP each time.  This created a grunge effect which I decided to keep.

This time I painted the robins directly onto the ATC using three of the Amsterdam acrylic paints.  I also added a branch for them to stand on.

This time the lettering was added with white EP and a white Sakura gelly roll pen over a white Amsterdam acrylic marker.

For the final ATC, R is for rectangles, I started with a paper towel mop up sheet (Ecoline pens), adding it in the same manner as for the others.

I used the outside and solid fill rectangle stamps from Sam's Shapes 1 (Claritystamp) to add three outlines in black (Onyx Black Versafine / Clear EP), then added solid fills and overlays in various colours of Archival ink in greens and blues.

The lettering was added in the same way as for the roses ATC.