Digital ATCs

I've participated in a swap on ATcards to make some digital ATCs. I love playing with Photoshop but helas, it takes a lot of time so usually it falls by the wayside. However seeing a digital swap appearing on ATcards, was just the incentive I needed to make some digital ATCs. This is no ordinary swap in that we don't have to send our actual cards to the organizer but instead e-mail her with our cards as attachments. She uploads them to a Flickr album and at the due date we can all select our cards which she will print out and mail to us. She is in Australia and I was worried about the postage charges she will incur but as she is in one of my inchies swap, I have found a solution for that one! One of my "normal" ATCs will wing its way to her in due course.
I produced these ATCs by using the Layer facility on Photoshop Elements. The background layer are photographs I took last year of some sunflower seed heads which I left out for the birds to eat. It was really amazing what a beautiful picture they made after a few days out in the open. I overlaid these with images of vintage ladies taken from scanning in some of my vintage postcards and then adjested the opacity of these images so that the sunflower heads could be seen through them. The ATCs are called Dust to Dust and Ashes to Ashes respectively, referring to the fleeting nature of all things, both flowers and humans alike.

The final ATC is made with a picture of a sunflower head in full flower, overlaid with a scan of buttons and again playing with the opacity of the 2 images. I had great fun producing these cards and it's a good reminder to keep practising my digital skills as I had to refer back to my Elements books repeatedly as it's so easy to forget exactly how you do these things!