making something out of nothing and Bernie Berlin

Today's ATC was a major "what if".

Sorry about the reflection. but it is a bit shiny.
Way back here, when I was painting the page around the niche in my artbook, I put a piece of acetate underneath to stop paint getting onto the page below.
Another day, I was tidying my desk and found the piece of acetate with dried black paint and the rectangle looked just like an ATC.  I thought, what if I scratch into the acetate?  So I did and this is the result (paint side is down of course, so if you write it needs to be backward)
I have used a piece of batting, cut to size, wrapped some paperbacked foil over it, added a playing card at the back and attached the scratched acetate with brads. 
For a little bit of work, it has a great effect.

Now to Bernie Berlin, Author of Artist Trading Card Workshop
I have been trying out one of her exercises, using watercolour (I vaguely remember doing something similar many years ago when I was learning watercolour)

Here is a piece of watercolour paper which I dampened and dripped paint on then let it bleed and run.

Then I got a piece of heavy card that I had made an ATC size frame out of (2.5 x 3.5 in inside)
and moved it around the paper, to see what I could find.  You might want to rotate the paper and the frame quite regularly, because It will make an huge difference to what you see.  This might be a volcano erupting.

This looks like a little fish to me.  He is missing a tail, but that gives me something to embellish.

This one looks like two people, a woman on the left and a man on the right.

A princess standing under a tree?
The idea is to find pictures in the blobs and highlight them.
Here are some I have worked on.

After the earthquake, a pagoda is burning

Two people watching snow fall?

An Angel in the garden or maybe up in the clouds?

And a full moon through the trees.

I had a lot of fun with this technique, It certainly gets your brain thinking.  A good way to start off the day in my skeychbook, so you might see a few of these type of ATCs popping up now and then.

Remember creativity doesn't always have a plan.  Making it up as you go along can sometimes get your creativity moving.