au revoir, mes ICADs

cue the sad, sad music: another fab year of the index card a day project* has concluded, and once again i could not be more grateful for 61 days of inspiration, ideas, drawing practice and art friends. huuuuuuuuuuuuge thanks are due to the lovely tammy at daisy yellow who once again devised, hosted, coordinated and just generally cheered everyone on while we made our cards each day. she does all of that stuff year-round o'course, and you should totally check out her website because it's one of the most colorful and inspiring places on the whole entire internet! ♥♥♥

meanwhile, here are my last few cards of the year:

056: masheen

cogs and gears and... ummmmm... flowers and hearts and... ok, i have no explanation for why this one turned out this way, but i like it. so there!

057: sunrise

or in this case, sunset, because i absolutely loathe getting up that early, even for artistic porpoises. i tried a different method for this: i sponged and blended loads of distress and chalk inks on the blank card (having first outlined very faintly in pencil where i thought the sun and waves would be) and then drew the outlines in afterwards. definitely going to use this trick again.

058: queen of hearts

a combination of playing card and tattoo imagery... and a little bit of french... b/c everything sounds cooler en francais, non?!

059: plaid

my cousin richard is a professional stage manager, and in the mid-1990's he worked what seemed at the time like a nearly infinite number of productions of the musical "forever plaid" all over this great land of ours. so that was the first thing i thought of... and i just went with it. this also embodies my second rule/tip for art journaling or just generally getting going when i don't know what to make or what to draw; i do some doodling or hand-lettering or both.

060: advice

my first thought was to draw dear abby, lol. but then i thought i'd illustrate a piece of advice, instead. i had seen this quote on pinterest a while ago, and i thought it summed up a pretty great mindset. (plus... unlike quite a few equally smart mottoes, i found that the words suggested imagery i could use to make it visual.)

061: parachute

i wanted to make and tag (on instagram) my last card of the year specifically in honor of tammy at daisy yellow, so rainbow colors, hearts and fun lettering seemed like just the thing! ♥

the completed book

which... for the first time ever... looks exactly like it did when i started! that's because it was a pre-bound book of index cards from staples, whicht i bought specifically in hopes it would encourage me to work flat and rely less on my "comfort zone" activity of collage this year. in fact my secret goal was to draw, doodle or hand-letter on every single card... and i did it! kinda proud right here, even if it does make for the most boring "completed book" photo ever, lol! 

*there is a choice of (free!) uber-cool 2015 icad badges at daisy yellow for anyone who participated; or heck, you can start now, or next week or... just jump in and start whenever... 

konichiwa, icad week 8

i can't believe we're moving into the last week of icad2015 already... where the heck has the summer gone, eh?! meanwhile, here are my cards from last week:

050: kimono

i don't draw people, so this one was a bit of a stumper until i remembered the little amigurumi kokeshi doll i crocheted a few years ago, and realized i could do a kind of kawaii version. so i did! :)

051: garden

i love all botanical gardens, and i especially love the new york botanical garden in the bronx. they have two huuuuuuuuuuuuuuge waterlily pools and i can never, ever, resist taking elebenty million pics, of which the one below is an example as well as the inspiration for this day's icad.

052: symmetry

symmetry in drawing is not my favorite thing for the same reason CAS cards are not my favorite to make; in short: it's HARRRRRRRRRRD, people! but i had a go anyway.

053: raindrops

this is wet-into-wet watercolor blending of pencil-outlined raindrops from a julie balzer stencil. jeff made me promise not to outline it in pen at the end, but the subtlety of the colors just doesn't show up in pics very well. irl, i really love this one, though.

054: envelope

i've been very happy with my decision to make this year's icad 100% drawing and doodling, but i'd be lying if i said i wasn't starting to really miss collage. so i drew a collage for this one!!! :)

055: france

trying my hand at some tiny icons, which were incredibly fun to think up and to draw. and yes, before you ask, france is TOTALLY full of gigantic, cross-eyed, beret-wearing cats. totally.

pass the (ICAD) ketchup, please!

this last group of cards brings us current to sunday 7-19. meanwhile, i'm still making the cards each evening and usually putting them on instagram before i go to sleep. there's been a really good hardcore group of ICAD participants on IG this year, and it's fun to interact with them and see what they're making!

043: definition

drawing tip of the day: choose the thing you feel like drawing, then figure out how to make it fit the prompt!!! :)

044: focus or blur

see drawing tip above, then imagine my joy when i realized i could pretty much render anything i wanted, just by sticking it inside a pair of sunglasses. hot pink, bling-encrusted ones, obviously!

045: saturday night live

you could argue that i went way overboard with details and flourishes and colors bright enough to singe your retinas. but if you remember the first couple of years of snl, you'd then have to argue that all those things really capture what it was like!

046: album cover

i went with a really stylized version of disraeli gears mostly because of the imagery and colors involved, though actually, i like cream, generally, and this album in particular. (but really... hot pink wings and flourishes!!!)

047: fashion

decided to try my hand at some vintage sewing-pattern-style clothing illustrations. can i just say, this is soooooooooooo much harder than it looks? to anyone who routinely draws clothes, and enjoys it, i doff my (unpictured) chapeau!

048: disco

apologies for what has turned out to be the most persistent earworm of all time: the talking heads' "life during wartime" a song i totally loved until i drew the lyrics for an icad and got it stuck in my head for elebenty consecutive days. :0

049: black and white

i had a hard time narrowing down which of the gazillion ideas i had, so i just used all of them. problem solved! ♥

fun and games

this week of (100% optional) ICAD prompts (week 6: july 6-12th) were all related to different games, and i enjoyed coming up with ideas to go with each... some more literal than others!

036: backgammon

obviously a super-stylized take, but seriously, if i ever saw a backgammon set like this in a store, i'd buy it *instantly*!

037: chess or checkers

totally psyched that i was able to produce chess pieces which are somewhat dimensional looking, since shading is by far my worst thing! (but the less said about the background, the better, lol!)

038: mah jongg

i actually thought, going in, that this'd be a slam dunk. for one thing, i happen to own an utterly lovely vintage mah jongg set from which to draw the pieces, which are only dimensional squares and rectangles, for pete's sake! no idea why i flubbed it so badly, but the great thing about doing a 61 day project is that it's only one day; and somehow the ones that don't work out make the ones that *DO* work out seem even better! :)

039: monopoly or bingo

can you say, "comfort zone", lol?! having so thoroughly dis-enjoyed dimensional rendering of mah jongg pieces, i went with realllllllllly flat, doodley, mandala shapes inside the vague suggestion of a monopoly board.

040: yahtzee

again a sort of knock-on effect from mah jongg is going on, this time in the form of my asking myself, "seriously... who can't draw DICE??!" and then sort of sidestepping the dimensionality issue by drawing a dice-based patterned paper.

041: bridge or gin rummy

i traced around a real playing card with a pencil to get the outlines of mine to all be straight and the same size, then drew and painted my suits. and for the record, yes, they're all aces because that's a really good hand... AND... because it's easier and more fun to draw than four eights. 

042: scrabble

again, i've "cheated"-- if we want to call it that --by using a ruler to measure and mark the sections of the scrabble board, before doing the tiles and lettering by hand. i've also fudged a bit with regard to colored squares, to make a prettier pattern, with more pink in it. so there!!! :)

arrgh.

*how* can i have managed to not post ICAD cards again for like two and a half weeks??! probably because i've been too busy making them, i guess. i really am having a blast this year! i know i say that every year, but it's always true, and this year it feels especially valuable to be drawing every day. since there are so many, i think i'll break them into a few posts and spread them out over the week. hopefully this will also make my poor neglected blog feel a little less unloved, too, lol. ♥

032: the weather

a few days before this week's prompt list came out, i fell in love with a sweet little illustration on instagram by my fellow ICAD-er, kristin dudish, which leapt to mind when i read, "the weather". i put my own laureny spin on the idea, o'course... :)

033: mad men or i love lucy

i hesitate to tell anyone that i don't particularly like either of these shows, especially "i love lucy", because such news often freaks people out. but one of the things i love about using the (optional!) icad prompts is trying to think of what i could draw or doodle that would illustrate the idea. mad men is set in 1960's manhattan... hmmmmmmm... 

034: flag or independence day

on this night we had seen, from the comfort of our deck, the utterly awesome fourth of july fireworks display the local country club puts on each year, less than a mile away from our house. so it wasn't very hard to think up what to draw, lol!

035: portrait

ok this one stumped me a bit because although i knew right away i wanted to draw a fancy frame, i couldn't for the life of me think what to put in it. i don't really draw representationally... especially not in 3D... especially not people! on the other hand i loooooooooove kawaii food! and who says a portrait has to be realistic OR of people, anyway??! i rest my case. (ps: the downside to working in the bound book of index cards this year is that sometimes the day before bleeds thru or the day after isn't quiiiiiite dry when i close the book. so please to excuse the smudgies that occasionally appear, as they do on this page.)

more than meets the ICAD

yes, sorry, you'll have noticed i find the I-puns even more irresistible than ordinary ones. plus, i've always said that post titles are the hardest part of blogging and i stand by that judgement. meanwhile, i have some new index cards to show off and here they are now:

029: ice cream

i absolutely forced myself not to outline this in pen after i'd pencil-sketched and watercolored said frozen treats, because i think i rely on the outlines too much. having said that... i kinda miss them... ah, well. (ps the big grey smudges near the soft serve cone were not there when i photoed this the first time; i'm suspecting bleed through from the next page.) 

030: telephone

a phone from my childhood, in the olden days, though of course ours was not pink; i'm not sure pink had been invented yet. and yes, kids, we were tethered to the wall whilst communicating with our dear ones, just imagine that!    

031: trivia

if you are old enough to remember the 80's-- and trivial pursuit-- then this one is pretty self-explanatory. if not, i seriously doubt i could make it seem sensible. so there you go, it's a kind of binary ICAD, lol.

EYE- cad??!

the bad news: i got a bit behind again on blogging my cards for the index card a day (aka ICAD) project. the good news: there are lots (lots!!!) to show you now! :)

022: psychedelic

as always, the prompts are 100% optional, but tammy has been especially creative this year, giving each week a theme or a connection to get us thinking. this week it was all adjectives, which is cool, because they are specific enough to get you started, but general enough to have LOTS of interpretations. so ok, yeah, this one is arguably more like psycho-delic, but still...

023: geometric

what's more geometric than vaguely dimensional squares??! i rest my case.

024: romantic

my brain went utterly blank for this one. eventually i thought of doing a rose. i'm not in love with it, but it does pretty much look like a rose, and when you are as new at drawing as i am, producing something at all recognizable still totally feels like a win! yay!

025: botanic or organic

i have no idea why, but i really like drawing food generally and fruit specifically. there's no rhyme or reason, that's just how it is. so why not go with it?  

026: exotic

i had a lot of india-related ideas, and i put ALL OF THEM into a 3x5" space. yeah. ok, so, the thing i like best about this one is actually that i don't like it at all. which is cool because it means i'm being experimental and focusing on process more than outcome. which is-- to me-- kind of the whole point of ICAD. plus... peacock feather!!!

027: academic

if you were to flick through my sketchbook you'd see approximately 40% finished drawings, 10% random jotted notes and 50% that i would categorize as "trying stuff out". the latter consists of rough sketches to get the line of something, paint color tests, wonky attempts at shading, etc. the page below had A LOT of swipes of watercolor from a couple of weeks ago when i was trying to mix a few specific colors. and a totally unrelated half grapefruit, lol. later, when i was doodling, i turned the swipes into books. an idea that came back to me when i read the word "academic" on the prompt list. just another example of the fundamental interconnectedness* of all things! :)

028: dramatic

i had absolutely no thematic idea for this one. at all. on the other hand, i had been wanting to draw some marquee letters for a while. so there ya go. my spacing is pretty wonky... and don't even look at the "I"... (which, ACK, that's totally made you have to look at the "I" hasn't it?! sorry.) but it was fun to draw and color and i don't think anyone anywhere could possibly argue that it's not, in fact, pretty darned DRAMATIC! (woohoo.) :)

*we are watching dirk gently via acorn tv. something i put off doing for a while because the douglas adams books are some of my all time faves and i feel strangely protective of them. also, i frankly didn't love the bbc radio versions, despite harry enfield writing and playing the title role, which really ought to have been spot-on. as it turns out, i needn't have worried; the tv show is really quite different from the books, but it somehow still feels completely right, if that makes sense? the best surprise is that stephen mangan-- who does not look or sound at all like i imagined dirk-- is absolutely perfect in the role. guys, i'm sorry i ever doubted you! now could we get a second series, maybe??

now even ICAD-ier!

more index cards, anyone? because it just so happens i have a few more to show:

018: treehouse

i was going for something fun and magical, like maybe elves would live in, or fairies, or just very thin people without any fear of confined spaces or heights. however i'm pretty sure that exterior staircase won't meet minimum safety standards anywhere-- probably not even in magical fictional worlds-- so i expect to hear from the elfin version of OSHA any day now.

019: snowglobe

still really loving teeny tiny cities, and also to let my drawings go off the page. fairly proud that after many (MANY!) attempts to draw a simplified version of the eiffel tower, i've actually produced one that's recognizable, wahey!!!

020: color wheel

this one started off with the idea of rainbow colors, and wheels with spokes and trimmings, like on fancy bikes; but i got a bit carried away with the fancifying. ok, yeah, maybe more than a bit. but you know... inna good way, lol...

021: the 1970's

holy moly, what a decade that was for design! it's impossible to draw anything too bright, too colorful, or too crazy... just go back and look at the magazines or tv shows, it was a free-for-all! thus david cassidy and i both fit right in; which is nice because, as a matter of fact, we had the same haircut in 1974 (and at least one of us is still having flashbacks)!!! :)

index cards for EVERYBODY!

more ICAD fun is taking place on the daisy yellow blog, in the flickr group, on facebook and especially on instagram, where there is inspiration galore!!! here are my latest cards:

015: route 66

this one really had me stumped, until i remembered a cool map that june drew, with some interstate route signs on it, which looked pretty awesome. since ICAD locks me into the same size and shape for every card, i've been experimenting with the placement of my images; at the moment, i quite like letting them go off the page... especially something like a route sign that really needs to be symmetrical, lol! (there's always a way to "cheat"!) :)

 016: greeting card

i nearly skipped this one because, afterall, my main area of papercrafting is making cards, and ICAD is meant to be a "break". finally i went with a hand-drawn birthday-themed image, that i wasn't in love with, so i decided to add lots of pattern and details. ...and now... ok, i still don't like it, but that's fine, ICAD is about *process* so it's good to have a few clunkers which take us out of our comfort zone!

017: wabi sabi

there's always at least one ICAD prompt that i have to look up. one year it was the ogee pattern; another was payne's grey. this time it was wabi sabi, which is the japanese aesthetic that reveres beauty which is "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete" and especially celebrates nature, patina, and a sort of rustic vibe. so i went with vines on a brick wall, which i sort of like the look of, but i reallllllllllllly liked the hypnotic feeling of drawing and painting. so i'm callin' this one a win! :)