PaperArtsy: ATC's in Series with Seth Apter stamps {by Floss Nicholls}

Wednesday, 15 April 2026

ATC's in Series with Seth Apter stamps {by Floss Nicholls}

Hello everyone, Floss here with you today...

Would you believe, of all the years that I have been creating mixed media...or art in general even, that I have never made a batch of ATC's?! Today I changed that and made some in a series using Seth Apter rubber stamps.

The first thing I did was mark out my paper and added washi tape to give me a grid which left me with a clean white 3mm border all round the ATC card. I used a standard playing card size. I then used a palette knife to add PaperArtsy Seaglass acrylic to areas of the grid.

Closely followed by gesso onto some areas over and clear of the Seagrass and let that dry before sprinkling infusions onto newly wetted areas...

I worked it with a large watercolour brush to spread the colour...and leave puddles.

I used one of the stamps from the Seth Apter set ESA49 to stamp text to cover more than one ATC card so that only parts of the stamp were visible on a few of the cards.

I did the same kind of positioning with the circles stamp from the Seth Apter set ESA50, but instead of using ink, I painted the stamp with PaperArtsy's Blood Orange Acrylic to bring some contrast colour in.

And again using the feather leaf shape stamp using ESA49 and Pine Grove Fresco Finish Acrylic.

The long thin shape worked beautifully across two cards as well as the length of one card...it really did not matter that it went over the taped borders as I would be peeling them off at the end.

I used opaque vanilla WOW embossing powder for extra details. I used parts of the rubber stamp cross as well as whole crosses from the Seth Apter set ESA49 on the cards. I heat set the powder making sure all the powder had melted.

I felt like some of the embossed words needed something more...

and so I decided to use my palette knife to smear PaperArtsy Fresco Finish Squid Ink Acrylic over them...

I thought this made the words 'pop' a little more.

Once all the embossing and stamping was completed I was able to remove the washi tape...some of which I would keep for another project as it had some great textures on it!

I really liked how using the tape separated and spaced the design elements leaving a crisp edge which is very unlike me. I usually favour ripped or overspill edges!

Rather than using a guillotine or paper strimmer I decided to rip the borders against a metal rule. I tested which way to rip first so that I had the 'cleaner rip edge' I found that pulling the card image part worked best for my preferred outcome.

After I had separated the cards, I rounded the corners, edged finished them and finally added some of the 'squiggly lines' from stamp set ESA49 and embossed them using Opaque vanilla Wow embossing powder.