Stepping out in faith

One Year Art Journal isn't a spiritually focused blog, but quite often its prompts put me in touch with my spirituality. The Nov. 15 prompt is "What Do You Want Right Now?" and the second "booker" prompt is to use rubons. Well, it just so happens my most recent rubon purchase is some spiritually focused ones I bought about a year ago, to illustrate my grandson's baptism on a scrapbook page. I also had a few much older rubons that are like fake stitches.

The older rubons came off fairly decently for their age, although since they are white, I am not sure how well they show up in this photo. They are on the left side of the page, which I had already created a striped watercolor background on.

The newer rubons were more of a challenge. Big chunks of all three stayed on the backing, no matter how much I rubbed. So, I decided to fill in the gaps with some gold Stickles.  Not perfect, but better. The top rubon is a dove, the bottom one, which largely stuck to the backing, is a cross. In between is a quote "Let The Faith In Your Heart Be Your Guide."

It is this quote that inspired the rest of my journaling. As One Year Art Journal and several other inspiration sites prompted, I picked a One Little Word for the year, which was "Content." At the beginning of 2013, I thought I'd have plenty of good reasons to focus on the portion of that word that means "being content with what you have." (I also was focusing on some of the other meanings of the word, but that's not part of the point of this entry.) I ran out of unemployment in April, so I was bracing myself for what I thought (correctly) would be a rough year.

But things started looking up in May. I started my business, Pen Porter, that month. Seeing as I invested nothing but the cost of registering my business, it's been profitable. Not quite as much as I'd hoped, but then in August, I got hired to manage the Jurupa Valley Chamber of Commerce part-time. So there's another little bit of income, and it's more than I thought it was going to be. So that's good.

On the somewhat bad side, I've decided I had to split my income off from Don's. I won't go into all the reasons why, but if you know me, you might know why. But the up side of that means I now have some freedom to spend some of my income as I see fit. There's a million things I want, far fewer things I can get.

And then there is a challenge to reach beyond myself. My co-worker, Bob Hernandez, inspires me to this in many ways. He is working at the Chamber strictly as a full-time volunteer, but invests a lot in me both timewise, and financially. He would like to see me "pay it forward," although I can only do so on a limited basis now.

But Sandals has always challenged people to reach beyond themselves. For the past six weeks it specifically has done so through its "Reach" building campaign. This campaign asked us to look beyond ourselves and let God move in our church. Sandals also has a holiday gift giving ministry.

It gave me a lot of pleasure to invest in two gifts for a 13-year-old girl, and to commit a small amount of money over the next two years to the building campaign. I feel like I am a part of something significant, that will reach far beyond myself. I've blessed a young girl, and I've helped my church bless many others through the building campaign.

The journaling at the bottom of this page explains "In the past few months, I have moved from being simply content to feeling blessed and looking beyond myself."

I know this is exactly how God wants me to feel. And therefore, it's what I want for myself right now.

Journaling some of the fall holidays

I know only post sporadically on this blog, mostly my art journal pages. Some of the pages I share on certain Facebook groups instead. But for A Year In the Life of An Art Journal, it often works better to post them on my blog. This day's story also references a page I did inspired only by some Daisy Yellow prompts and the proximity at that time of Veterans' Day.

I more recently finished pages inspired by both the Oct. 30 and Nov. 15 prompts at A Year in the Life of an Art Journal. Here's my story about the Oct. 30-inspired page.

Oct. 30 was in honor of Halloween. The first prompt was "Scary," and the second was to create stripes, like the Wicked Witch of the East's striped socks. Remember her from the Wizard of Oz? She was the one crushed by the house at the beginning of the movie. All you saw were the striped socks peeking out from under the house.

I'd already painted one of my art journal pages orange because of a Daisy Yellow Daily Paper Prompt gone wrong. Then I saw some Zentanglish stripes on Pinterest, and copied them to the best of my ability. But then the page sat there for about two weeks, not anywhere near finished in my mind. I knew that my "scary" orange and black page would somehow focus on Halloween. But Halloween is not my favorite holiday, so I wasn't sure how to finish it. So, I moved on, working on some of my favorite inspiration sites via other pages in my art journal. Quite recently, I came across prompts in Daisy Yellow DPP "Ransom Note," and another prompt in Emily Falconbridge's 52 Questions, which is a series of prompts she published in 2009, but I only discovered at the end of 2012. The prompt in 52 Questions was "What Is Your Favorite Holiday?" My favorite is Easter, which is not a holiday I'm thinking a whole lot about right now. Instead, as I thought about how I might incorporate ANY holiday into an art journal page, my mind roamed from Halloween (this at the time unfinished page) to Veterans' Day (a holiday I had already recently incorporated into another page, below) to Thanksgiving (a holiday I like almost as much as Easter, and will no doubt feature in the journal soon, but not yet.)

Halloween won out when I remembered that I had purchased some really cute Halloween stickers last year to scrapbook my grandson's first Halloween. And Daisy Yellow's DPP "Ransom Note," (create a ransom note with mismatched stickers brought it all together. I decided I'd use the "scary" stickers, the skeletons and the ghosts, on the page. I also wanted to use some of the gazillion "candy" stickers I had left. So, with a little bit of imagination, I came up with the idea to "kidnap" my least favorite holiday, and warn the world that if they want it back, they must give me candy.  I can be pretty diabolical, can't I?

I have no regrets, but I do make mistakes

One of the art journal challenge blogs I read regularly is A Year In the Life of An Art Journal. It's getting a little neglect these days, because unlike the challenges I work on daily at Daisy Yellow Art, this blog is only updated with a new challenge twice a month. Most recently, it was updated with a challenge to journal about regrets, and to use thick paint (it actually recommended texture paste, but I don't have that) on the page. There is a photography challenge you can do with or instead of the art journal challenge. This time, it was to photograph your least favorite beverage mug.

If I still had it, my least favorite mug would have been my once treasured Daily Press 50th anniversary mug. But I smashed that thing into the Daily Press's trash can just before we moved to Riverside. And that made me think of the "cracked" page I had created, just waiting for some prompts that would actually involve journaling. You can learn about the process and other prompts that led to the creation of the background here.

My orange paint is definitely the thickest of the two containers of paper paint that I own. It was created by mixing water with a powdered pigment. Because I had left it open overnight not too long ago, the paint is now thicker than it used to be, which simply means I'll have to add more water before using it for "normal" purposes. No problem. I hqve had to do that with just about all my acrylic paints as well, even though all but one of them eventually got to the point where water or no water, no more paint was coming out. But the orange paint is in a large enough jar it doesn't have to be squeezed out. You can dip a paintbrush right in. I did, and added a liberal dose of the thick orange paint. Since the first coat of the paint on this page 1) Was applied before the jar of paint thickened and 2) Was dabbed onto this page with an index card that was already wet from a freshly applied tea stain, the new coat is quite a contrast to the first coat.

Once my new paint was dry, I tackled the journaling. As a Christian, I've learned not to spend too much time thinking about my regrets. Repentance of sins means to acknowledge you did something wrong, then move on and trust Jesus to help you do the right thing next time. That even has been the focus of a series of sermons I've heard at church recently from First Peter. I merged the thoughts of several verses in Peter and elsewhere to create this reminder to myself of how I should live.

Finishing up the ICADS

I didn't quite make 61 ICADs when I was participating in the Index Card A Day challenge at Daisy Yellow Art. If I had done the challenge "correctly" I would have made one of those little cards every day, and thus would have had 61 at the end of the two months.

ICAD 41 before I added stitching

 This ICAD, shown here in its initial stage, was one of the last, and  takes advantage of prompts from the last list for ICAD and the Daily Paper Prompts that Daisy Yellow Art is now expanding one day at a time. (There will be 61 of those eventually as well, as they started Aug. 1 and will run through Sept. 30)

From the ICAD prompts, I first used "teabag."  I dragged a wet used teabag across the card, a technique I think is partially responsible for the marbled look. That list also had "paint drips," which meant painting orange paint onto the wet card. At that point in time, I had worked my way through the first six Daily Paper Prompts, so I decided that for Prompt 7 "Leftovers," I would begin by adding some leftover paint to my Prompt 5 "Linear" creation. I wasn't sure for several days what I would do after adding the paint, but here is how I finished the page.

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DPP 5 Linear, before modifications

Linear, when I had added leftover paint and scraps for DPP 7 Leftovers.

A third item on the last ICAD list was "Ogee pattern," which is not exactly like what I drew in ICAD 41 above. (I just didn't draw it right). My Ogee pattern color scheme was actually inspired by something other than Daisy Yellow. My Kleenex box has a more true Ogee pattern in similar colors.

Since Daily Paper Prompt 8 was "Faded," I decided to use it on this ICAD. To do the "Faded" technique for that days prompt, you must draw a pattern with neocolors (if you have them) or watercolor pencils (if, like me, that's all you have), then spray them with water. (This is one wet ICAD!).

There was one more prompt on the ICAD list, "Looks like fabric" I used paper that looks like fabric. It's a scrap that has been in my scraps stash a long time. I knew that scrap was there, but didn't know it was the perfect size to cover a 4 x 6 index card. When I figured that out, I decided the fabric paper should be a background, so I cut the "ogee pattern" parts out of my ICAD in progress, and glued to them to the fabric paper I had already glued to a new index card. Some of the scraps leftover from that also made it to the combination 5/7 Daily Paper Prompt page.

I wasn't quite done with the ICAD prompts, but that was all of them I used on this card. I had combined one word on that list "celebration" with staple collage on the previous week's list. I used elephant, doodles galore and concentric circles on one last ICAD, and that was the end of the ICADS for me.

 However, Daily Paper Prompt 10 called for "stitching." Again inspired by the Kleenex box, I had wanted to add white stitching to this ICAD. But I couldn't find my stitching needles. I wasn't going to let that slow me down though, so I decided I could just glue the thread onto the page, and work with it to reasonably follow the contours of the Ogee pattern.

I have mixed feelings about that addition to the card. I was just using plain glue from Dollar Tree, so it was kind of hard to work with. The thread (dental floss, yes I am on a tight budget) didn't contour as well as I had hoped, and the glue came out in a thicker line than it should have.  As i was working with this floss, there were a few times where bits of the Ogee pattern tore off, leaving rough white patches in its place. And ultimately, the floss didn't completely follow the curves of the Ogee pattern. But now the last ICAD is done!

I ended up with 42. After I purchased my current art journal, I noticed I already had a similar, but smaller book. It was the perfect place to glue each and everyone of my ICADs. I'll have room for some more of them next year.

All 42 ICADs in their permanent home

But I wasn't quite finished with Ogee patterns. That was the technique for Daily Paper Prompt 11. (Both it and Daily Paper Prompt 3 "Paint Drips," were repeated on the ICAD list. Since DPP was created last year, it's the ICAD list that does the repeating.). I used the same color scheme as on the ICAD detailed above, and also repeated the Faded technique from DPP 8 on this, but left off the tea stain, the paint and the scrap of paper that looks like fabric.  I think I did a slightly better job drawing the Ogee pattern though. It's a tough one!

The Ogee pattern inspired page in my art journal.

On the bright side

It's just the name of an ongoing art journal challenge I participate in called A Year In The Life of An Art Journal. Challenges there are only twice a month, on the 15th and the 30th. The July 30 challenge is to do a journal page inspired by "On the bright side" and to use yellow.

My art journal largely follows prompts from other art journalists' blogs. Even so, Book 2, my current journal, is shaping up to be a book about the many good things in my life. So I could have just added yellow to a number of pages, but this one seemed to benefit from it the most. I'd already done all the journaling but the yellow (the words and the clouds) for a page about my dreams. Since then, I realized one of them, and was able to check that box. The other two are fairly realistic dreams as well, although #3 will take me a while to realize.

Adding yellow ink all over the page made it just look a little sunnier. And really, sometimes when it's super hot here in southern California, the sky almost looks yellow. Thankfully, it hasn't been that hot lately, except on my page.

Back to (almost) daily art journaling

I didn't create a bunch of pages in my art journal during the months of June and July because of the little index cards I was working on for Index-Card-A-Day, a challenge at Daisy Yellow. But now she's moving on to something kind of new, the Daily Paper Prompts.

This is my second summer/fall joining in the DPP Challenge. I finished my "introduction" to Daisy Yellow, Jump Start Your Art Journal sometime during August of 2012, and then basically moved onto some prompts she was in the process of posting, one a day. I finished behind schedule, but there were others on the Daisy Yellow Facebook page who started the prompts even later than I.

This year, except that I started today and already did the first three, I am on schedule. Since it's still only Aug. 2 here, I will respect the concept of Daily Paper Prompts being something you follow daily, one a day, in order, and I will only post my first two. Besides, the third one is more of an excellent background, so I'm waiting to see what gets posted for Sunday. Although the concept of Daily Paper Prompts is one "creation" a day, I think the rules allow for one day's creation to be layered on top of an earlier days. I know I did a bunch of that last year.

But here's my first two.

Prompt 1, Rainbow. I've already slightly goofed on this one. The prompt was to "paint" a rainbow, and I had an overwhelming desire to draw my rainbow crocheted potholder instead. Besides, I did sort of paint a rainbow last year. I already had something less than a "rainbow" of acrylic paints by the time I started the Daily Paper Prompts, so in Book 1 there's a rainbow of black, blue, purple and red. Now, even with having bought one new paint, I am down to two colors of paint. This year, I did want to do something different. Maybe I'll watercolor pencil paint another rainbow, but not right away.

Prompt 2, windows. My windows are cutouts of some random doodles I had in Book 1, which may even have been inspired by a later prompt in 2012. The left side window also has journaling, "From now on I am just going to do what makes me happy." The newspaper clipping is from a road race I was in, but I believe I'm ahead of everyone in this photo.

Another week of ICADS

This week, I continued my participation in Daisy Yellow's "Index Card A Day" Challenge. It's Day 42 of the challenge, and I have finished 28 cards. 

 

 

 

 

 

The prompts "draw your earrings" and "psychedelic"  inspired a renovation to an existing card.

This is how my ICAD looked before the renovation. The above version is actually inspired by five prompts, as this one was inspired by "grocery list," "nail polish" and "peace sign."

I decided to make a backgammon board with brown and black pieces of tape, as backgammon board and washi tape were prompts this week.

 Prompts of mosaics and leaves inspired this card. Then the wind blew real leaves onto my just-vacuumed floor.

 There were two more prompts on Week 6 of the Daisy Yellow ICAD challenge that I did not do, which were "graffiti" and "stream of consciousness." I'm still thinking of ideas for them, so we shall see. The Week 7 prompts are also posted now.  But Tammy had some extra, personalized prompts this week. We asked for, she gave. Mine was rainbow, fruit and collage. I decided some old Sweet Stack paper needed to be collaged.

Adding things as I go

Since my last post two days ago, I haven't made much progress on my ICADs, but I have changed the appearance of two of them some.

I added a lot more stamps to my most recently created ICAD. And, because of the lighting differences the two times I photographed them, it also looks like I somehow bleached my card in between.

Then I followed the first two prompts for ICAD this week - Draw your earrings and psychedelic. I am grateful for the first prompt, because it also prompted me to organize my jewelry drawer, and while I was at it, a portion of the huge mess that is my scraproom. I drew my most psychedelic earring. However, because the pink post has broken off  its other part of the pair, I then threw this earring away. Pink, blue and purple didn't look quite psychedelic enough to me, but the peace sign I had drawn for another ICAD two weeks ago did. So I cut out the earring from the ICAD it was on, and glued it to my older ICAD. That also helped with this week's weekly prompt, "textures." I like the texture of the wadded up grocery list, which was splashed with pink nail polish and whiteout before I drew the peace sign on it. Also, two layers of index card gives some texture, right?

ICAD stands for Index-Card-A-Day, a challenge issued by Tammy Garcia of Daisy Yellow. The goal of the challenge is to create art of some sort on 61 index cards, either following a list of prompts or not. I'm pretty much following the prompts, but because I keep doubling, tripling or in this case, quadrupling up on them, I don't have the 37 cards I should have yet. The card with all the stamping makes #25. I probably won't end up with quite as many as I "should" but I'm sure that's OK.

The artist in me

Here are the first 20 cards I made for Index-Card-A-Day at Daisy Yellow.

And here's the last five. I am far from the most creative art journaler on an index card. In fact, without Tammy Garcia's prompts, I would have very little idea of what to do with these index cards. But I've come up with some creative spins on her prompts, I think.

Pinterest and challenge blogs combine for two

I create a little bit of art almost every day, drawing inspiration from several challenge blogs - especially Daisy Yellow and A Year In the Life of An Art Journal. My two pieces of artwork created yesterday are inspired by both.

The current A Year In the Life of An Art Journal challenge was to create a page with the theme "Put Your Feet Up," and to create what looks like a beverage's "ring" on the page. And over at Daisy Yellow, host Tammy Garcia's now half-way through Index-Card-A Day challenge.Although the weekly challenge at Daisy Yellow this week is to use neutral colors, it's also to use tea or coffee on  a page.

At Pinterest, there's a much brighter and better example of what I tried to do here. Unfortunately, Blogger isn't letting me post anything from Pinterest, nor from Flickr. So I can't show you the original. Wouldn't know whose it was, since it was on Flickr.

When I saw this quote, I knew it was perfect for the A Year in the Life of An Art Journal page.  So, I tried to replicate what I saw there. The Pinterest page looks like watercolor pencils transferred with water color pens, but brighter. I knew mine would have to have more subdued tones, so I filled one of my water pens with tea, and stepped back to see what happened. Two pages I like.

A week of painted cards

 I have been busy creating cards this weekend for ICAD, mostly yesterday and today. So, I'm posting them all on Facebook in one swoop, and sharing a little more about each one here.  They're not posted in order here. Because the weekly prompt this week was "paint," I chose to use my big jar of peach powder paint for five of them.

 This was actually the last one, inspired by a cartoon i found on Facebook today, and the #8 ICAD daily prompt, "Happiness."

 I've had a pillow since I was in high school that inspired this one - also Prompt #6 for the week, "your name in block letters."

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 Two years ago in the spring, when the weather was much cooler than today, my husband and I visited Joshua Tree National Park. This is very similar to a picture I took there. It's inspired by Prompt #5, lizard.

 This is close to Jurupa Valley Chamber of Commerce's logo  - inspired by Prompt #4, logo.

 I don't like this card at all. It's inspired by prompts 1 and 2 for the fourth week of ICAD though - owl and lyrics. I thought the card was copying color, which would have showed the yellowness this old hymnal really has. An owl has to sing something with the word who.

 Before I looked at the second prompt, I attempted to draw an owl.

This may the most technique-focused page, although I made it up. Inspired by prompts 3 and 4, peace and shopping list, I glued a real shopping list to the index card, splattered nail polish and whiteout over that, and drew a peace sign in several colors.

Now, ready to begin Week 5. I have a good idea for the first one, and maybe the second one, but the rest are kind of stumpifying.

Give it your all

I enjoy running, and belong to a running club. Consequently I receive a magazine with all kinds of advice about running. While it may have been helpful, I loved the images of runners within for a much different reason. They make fantastic additions to my art journaling.

My latest contribution to the Index Card A Day Challenge combines both interests. Because whether it's running the streets, running my business or art journaling, I am interested in transforming potential into performance.

These runners are in the 1976 Olympic Marathon  I have never run a marathon, nor has 75 percent of the membership of my running club. The 25 percent that has run them would be lucky to finish around 3 hours and 20 minutes. The best of these runners probably finished in more like 2 hours and 20 minutes. So, while they aren't sprinters, they, like all Olympic runners, were designed for speed. They definitely run with everything they've got.  But then so do my marathoner friends, and I'd like to think that I do when I run a 5K. And I would like to think I give all that I have to other things I do,  although I know in some areas, that's not ture.

But whatever I do it's good advice. For me, and for you. Once you realize that you need to do what you were designed for, and you give that everything you've got, your winning season starts now. So make he most of every advantage, and go run.

Art journaling is probably not what I'm designed for, but when an idea comes together, I will run with it. This idea is "found poetry,"  which is collecting words and phrases from a magazine and assembling them into some kind of poem. If you squint at the blurry lines, you see my poem says what I've said here. Not a bad found poem!

San Diego, more ICADs and one full-size journal page

One place I have enjoyed visiting on a more than annual basis since moving not too far away is San Diego, California. During the two years my cousin lived just west of there in Coronado - and especially in the year my aunt and uncle were there too, we visited more than once a year.  But now they have both moved - my aunt and uncle back to Exeter, and the kids to Nebraska.  As of today, I haven't been back down south since then. In fact, it has been almost a year. Since Wesley's birthday was celebrated in Orange County in 2012, it was Bradley's first birthday that we last visited San Diego. 

But soon, Don and I will be headed south - almost that far. My brother is getting married at Moonlight Beach in Encinitas on July 4. We don't know about anyone else, as my parents' hotel is considerably farther away, but our hotel is the Day's Inn a few blocks from this same beach.

And so, I had to make an index card celebrating the past visits to San Diego, and the near future visit to, um, San Diego County.

 

I am glad that even though we are in poverty, we can go to the beach. I did a real art journal page about where I would go if I were rich instead. This one was prompted by A Year in the Life of An Art Journal, but it was fun to give that some thought. If i were rich, instead of the beaches of southern and central California, and the fun/work trips we make to Hollywood on a regular basis, I would fly somewhere. It would probably still be to a beach, but far enough away no one could come there and say hi to me. So probably, some deserted tropical island.

The topic of "city or map," one of the prompts for the ICADs last week, inspired this creation. This is my own little part of southern California, specifically the area between my condo and the City Council chambers.  Don and I, along with a Cal Poly student who was on the "planning" project Cal Poly had volunteered to help the city with, drew a similar but larger map on June 4 (minus the cute sun.) Then on June 6 the Cal Poly students presented a much more polished presentation to the City Council. Our city is supposed to be working on a general plan, but it of course, doesn't have the money to do so. So, it's working with a non-profit organization (Reach Out), Cal Poly Pomona and many residents to get some of the ground work done by very unconventional means.

 

These are a few more ICADs I've made in the past week or so, following prompts at Daisy Yellow.

My princesses

For days 4 and 5 of the ICAD (Index Card A Day) challenge, I focused on my granddaughter's love of princesses, and specifically, a conversation Holly and I had in which she was trying to convince Abigail that princesses wear pants. Well, at least Jasmine does. It was also noted by someone else on facebook that Ariel wears a similar outfit, but fins. Then when "crown" came up as one of the prompts on ICAD, and a couple of other ICAD posters followed their own beat and drew their own mermaids, I decided I could draw both Jasmine and Ariel to represent the "crown" prompt.

ICAD 2

My ICAD  (see http://daisyyellow.squarespace.com/icad/) for Day 2 is more technique-focused than most of them will be. It also is one that took a more convulted path to its own inspiration.

First, the technique. I found it at http://artangeloriginalart.blogspot.com/2010/11/mixed-media-crumpled-tissue-technique.html. This is a new blog for me to discover featuring a talented artist named Angie. Not sure what her last name is. She has the perfect description of this technique there, so I won't post it all over again on my blog.

But that's not where I originally found the inspiration.Although every art journal (and now ICAD) of mine is inspired by some sort of prompt this ICAD mimics an art journal page that was inspired by three different blogs.

First, I am going back into the archives of Emily Falconbridge's Life Is Art, which inspired a similar artistic journey into minatures back in 2007 when I did the Deck of Me. I'm not going quite that far back though. This link is to Week 26 of her "52 Questions," which is a year of artistic prompts she blogged iin 2009. The question that week was interesting "What would you write on your walls?" I think she had a guest blogger that week who didn't own her own home, so she wasn't free to do with her walls as she pleased. I am, but most of my walls are covered with furniture, photos, wall hangings, etc. Don is a hoarder  likes a lot of stuff, so for that and other reasons, it's best we leave our walls plain white.

So, although inspired by that prompt, I took scrapbook paper that looked like old kitchen wallpaper, glued it to my art journal and then wrote about the wallpapers we had in my childhood home, and also about the wallpapering-paneling project my first husband and I had planned but never got around to.

Then I found the current (May 30) prompt on A Year In the Life of An Art Journal. Interestingly enough, that prompt is also about walls, in this case the kind you put up yourself, even if you've never built a home. (It kind of reminds me of a column I wrote when I was 24 about accidentally kicking a hole in my cheap apartment wall, but wanting to tear walls of hostility completely down.) I don't think I have walls of hostility in my life right now, but there are other psychological walls I could, but would rather not, write a book about. It was this blog's host, Rachel Whetzel, who recommended the crumpled tissue paper technique listed above, as a way of creating texture on a paper "wall." And so, I added that to my wallpaper journaling. I wasn't sure what I was going to add on top of that though.

Until the next day, when Tammy Garcia at Daisy Yellow jumped the gun on her ICAD Challenge, and posted a whole bunch of prompts a day early. Some of the one-word prompts she posted to inspire us this first week in June are repurpose (which I am doing with the tissue paper, which was originally purchased around Christmas to help with gift wrapping), wallpaper (WOW) and paisley. Just so happens my "wallpaper" scrapbook paper came in a pad from Target (years ago) that also had a paisley pattern. Perfect! Oh and there's one more on Daisy Yellow's list, calligraphy. I don't really no how to do that, so I wrote fancy writing. The art journal page explains how my house and walls are too chaotic to be anything but white. The ICAD used the same papers, same mist and same crayon, and the same journaling pen - but to simply say ICAD 2013. Although this is Day 2, it will be the cover for my (hopefully) 61 ICADS when wer're done.

I can ICAD

Daisy Yellow  (Tammy Garcia) has her fellow art journalists keeping busy. In 2013, she usually gives us one prompt with six items, and challenges us to use all six in a single art journal creation. But in June and July, she's giving us weekly prompts, and a list of eight other prompts each week, which we can use daily. And she has no expectation that we will use any of them, as the challenge is simply to create art every day. Oh, there is one more catch. It needs to be on an index card. Thus it is ICAD, or Index Card A Day.

Here is the full story. You will have to scroll down through at all the ICAD entries to see the prompts, but right now as I write this, there's only one day of ICAD entries.

And here is my first ICAD. I actually followed three of the "daily" prompts (zebra, Candyland and faux stitching) and the weekly prompt to use colors of the rainbow.

I was also inspired by this very simple piece of artwork I found on Pinterest.

I have ideas for two more ICADS, and I have intentions to add one a day to this blog, with hopes I can continue after that. The reason is that each of my next two prompts are inspired by items on the daily list, but each also by other artwork, in these cases, some of my own recent art journal creations that I have not shared yet. So, to fully share my creative process, I plan to blog.