ART PROMPT

‘Art Cards, Editions and Originals’, and ‘Artist Trading Cards’

The art exhibition in your file, or on your mantelpiece

It is no coincidence that my favourite form of art is the same size as Will Hull’s baseball cards — that is — 2.5 x 3.5 inches.

They therefore fit the little sleeves that baseball cards can be kept in, likewise the pages for files with nine pockets in them. They are a nice size to hold a pack of them in your hand, like playing cards; like the collections of fantasy cards of more recent years.

The original ‘art card’ was made by a Swiss artist, M Vanci Stirnemann, in 1997. He created 1,200 of these small pieces of art for an exhibition, basing their size on the collectible sports cards.

He also encouraged others to make their own art cards in order to swap them with him for his art cards. Artists have been trading art cards ever since — hence ‘Artist Trading Cards’ or ATCs.

That is, ‘trading’ as in swapped for other ATCs, or given away — not as in buying and selling.

If artist trading cards are sold they then become, ‘Art Cards, Editions and Originals’ or ACEOs. They were first sold on eBay by the wonderful ‘bone-diva’ artist, Lisa Luree in 2004. She created quite the eBay art revolution, and I’m so pleased she did!

I started my current art business in 2007 and in investigating the best type of work that I could do entirely at home, I stumbled across ACEOs on eBay. Back then, a search for ACEOs might find a few hundred results. Now — and I’ve just done a search — there are over 16 thousand.

I think they reached their hey-day in about 2009? (I’m happy to be corrected), but even so — there are still 16 thousand ACEOs today on eBay today.

At the peak of the eBay ACEO collecting fervour, people would outbid each other to get particular pieces, especially if they were good examples of the current trend by a popular artist.

Trends came and went — there was a crow/rook/raven/corvid passion; witches; a mermaid trend; a barrage of cats, raccoons, mice, pegasus and unicorn pictures …

Anything and everything under the sun — there will be an ACEO for it.

I still paint ACEOs and always will. They are perfect for painting, and for collecting. They don’t take up too much room either to paint, or to collect.

The only criteria for an ACEO to be an ACEO is its size — any medium, any material, any design can be used.

Some people keep their ACEO collections in photo albums, some in special files with 9-pocket pages the right size — that is, the same size pockets that are used for baseball cards and game cards etc — some people have frames and swap their pictures about.

ACEOs are a great way of putting together a diverse range of original art at reasonable prices, without having to venture into a gallery.

I have a very large collection of other people’s ACEOs from all over the world. They tell me so much apart from the picture itself — they’re signed by the artist, often say what medium has been used, dated, frequently with the country of origin written on them, and titled.

They are a story in themselves, in a very small package.

I’ve written this piece today in response to a prompt from Will Hull so there hasn’t been time to gain permission from other artists to show their work, so all the ACEOs on here are my own.

(As you might have noticed, I tend to paint mostly dogs.)

When I’ve gained permission, I shall write some stories about other ACEO artists’ work, and come back here to insert a link to them.

In the meantime, anyone interested can find the eBay group which was set up all those years ago, still going strong on Facebook today, here.

This story has been written in response to Will Hull tagging me here:

And he wrote his in response to yesnodunno’s story here:

I’m tagging the people Will tagged:

Dave Logan, Amanda Wilson, Penny Grubb, Susan Alison, Susan Foster, Kyomi O’Connor, Rodney Brazier, Thief, Raine Lore, Darht Bjehl, Pierce McIntyre, Sadie Seroxcat, Roo Benjamin, Penelope Mayfield, Jessie Waddell

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Read more from me: © Susan Alison 2021