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.