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.