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.