Making Zetti-Style ATCs Using Photoshop

At the end of 2011, when the list of ATC themes for my Roses On My Table ATC group were posted, the November theme was Zetti. Zetti? What? Never heard of it. Well, I Googled information and images and fell in love. I couldn't wait to give it a try. The Zetti style came from artist Teesha Moore. http://www.teeshamoore.com/ She has a unique style that combines black and white graphic elements like stripes and harlequin diamonds with punchy color and writing. The style really appealed to me...but it turned out to not be as easy as I thought. My first attempts were pretty clumsy--I didn't have the supplies I wanted handy, and couldn't find the right colors, my markers ran, my paper was lumpy. I was seriously disappointed after waiting months to give it a try. Then I hit on the idea of working in Photoshop, and mixing scanned jpegs of my own artwork with vintage clipart from The Graphics Fairy. http://graphicsfairy.blogspot.com/ I added a photo of me as a 5-year old and a favorite photo of my dog Coco--also known as the "pink pup" http://lindaedkinswyatt.blogspot.com/2008/10/pink-pup.html from the day he "helped" me dye some soy batiks. It was a good chance to revisit some of my own favorite old images: Broken Chakra Girl http://lindaedkinswyatt.blogspot.com/2008/07/broken-chakra-girl-for-saqa.html and Panic Portrait, which I wrote about in my Cloth Paper Scissors http://www.clothpaperscissors.com/ article "Painting Out the Panic" a few year ago, as well as Mystery Woman of the Flowers, which I made a big quilt of and also make small quilted pieces for Art O Mat. http://www.artomat.org/ I found some good black and white patterns in Adobe Illustrator and puttered with combining all the elements into a Zetti piece. I have been in a bit of a funk artistically, but now feel inspired to try some larger pieces and incorporate fabrics and stitch...maybe not huge pieces, but certainly bigger than 2.5" x 3.5" ATCs.