Every time I join a new artist trading card series on swap-bot, I try to come up with a new look or style for the cards. Here are the ones I made for the most recent Supernatural character ATC series.

I started with a white background and my Supernatural tattoo rubber stamp, one of my best investments ever, created by dragonflycurls on Etsy.

I decided to keep the black & white look by going grayscale for all of them. I picked one photo of each character and then 2-4 smaller images that represent the character in some way. I cut them as best I could, so there was no whitespace around the edges of each image. The result looked pretty good, especially together as a group:

On the backs, I put another image of the character, in color this time. This was especially fun for characters like Meg and Ruby who then got to be represented one way on the front of the card and with a different “meat suit” on the back of the card.
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As October is a spooky month, Supernatural was the fandom theme for my swap-bot Fandom in a Bag group.

Here are the goodies I sent out to my swap partner:

My favorite item was the Hunter’s journal, in which I chronicled the adventures of a hunter who lives in my area and is somewhat less competent than the Winchester boys. It was fun giving her some personality and imagining all sorts of ghosts and demons in this area. With so much history (Civil War, Revolutionary War) and politics (D.C. is only a METRO ride away) I had a lot to choose from. It was part written journal and part artifact journal, where I pasted in flyers from historic sites, postcards, ads, newspaper clippings, and even interesting obituaries I found. I also included a lot of images and definitions from the internet so the journal was part handy reference guide as well. My favorite pages were the ones where I’d practice drawing symbols:

It took days, but it was a lot of fun. I’d love to make others, or make similar projects. It melds my crafting and fanfiction-writing worlds together.