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.