Week 9: Index Card a Day Concludes

Incredibly enough, we've (already?!) reached the end of ICAD; it seems like June and July fly by faster each and every year! Here are my cards from the past week:

Day 54: Mandala Monday

This rosy, leafy, semi-collaged mandala finds itself in Manhattan's Chinatown, at the corner of Mott and Pell Streets, which poses the deep philosophical question: Should we walk across Pell to Doyers and eat at Nom Wah Tea Parlor; or head down Mott to Chatham Square and go to Golden Unicorn? Decisions, decisions...

Day 55: Lemon or Lime

Lime, please!!!

(Handcut lime-slices made up of scraps of various green patterned papers)

Day 56: Winter

Snow and Ice (and doodle!) covered hills doodled with Tombows, outlined with a Letter It Fineliner and with sparkly bits of gel pen that utterly fail to show up in the photo!

Day 57: Bird

Inspired by all the amazing bird doodles in the Wendy Vecchi Facebook Group, I decided to make my own paper-pieced version. I may have gotten a little bit carried away...

Day 58: Illustration

This seemed like a good time to slide in one last #OneStapleCollage in this case all of the pieces in the stapled stack are vintage illustrations. From top to bottom: A 1965 Corvair; an example of hand-lettering for advertising; a gorgeous yellow rose from a gardening book; S & H Greenstamps (technically not an illustration, lol); a machinery diagram; and a black and white forest from a children's book. Attached with one staple to a funky olive green index card.

Day 59: Peaceful

There are few things that make me feel as #PEACEFUL as doodling randomly on an index card whilst watching British Mysteries on Acorn TV. Specifically, in this case, rainbow striped doodles during Brokenwood Mysteries, series nine.

Day 60: Filigree (Sorta)

I started out with the intention of doodling a #FILIGREE design for Day 60 of ICAD2023 but it morphed into more of a geometric repeating pattern in rainbow shades, so I just rolled with it... 

Day 61: Mosaic (Again... Pretty Loose)

One of my favorite things about ICAD is that you can use the prompts to get you started, but when your original idea morphs into something else entirely, it's still cool. It might, in fact, be even better than your original idea; but the main point is... you feel inspired and then can let yourself follow that inspiration WHEREVER it takes you. Maybe you'll also end up with a beautiful finished piece; even if you don't love the outcome, the process has likely given you a new idea of something to try in future. Whatever happens, you've gained something valuable. My other favorite thing is all the awesome artists I've met and interacted with over the simple act of creating art on index cards for 61 days in a row. Many thanks to everyone who has stopped by to say hi, and as always the biggest portion of my gratitude goes to Tammy Garcia, aka @gypsy999 who dreamt up this fun and inspiring shindig thirteen years ago and is still the biggest motivator and cheerleader I know. I'm already looking forward to June 1, 2024! 

♥♥♥♥♥

Week 8: ICAD Round-Up

We're getting to the end of the Index Card a Day challenge soooooo much quicker than I could have imagined, but here are my cards from this week:

Day 47: Mandala Monday

Today's mandala was 100% inspired by this beautiful bloom, which I cut out of an older piece of Vicki Boutin patterned paper.* Then I drew the outer layers of the mandala in a similar style, on a vintage library catalog card for a book about Gaugin. The flower is probably just a teeny bit too orange to strictly qualify for ICAD2023's Day 47 prompt of Vermillion, but let's just roll with it, k? 

(*The paper is called "Picked for You" and is from American Crafts' "All the Good Things" line.)

Day 48: Raindrops

An absolutely literal interpretation of today’s prompt!

Day 49: Focus

I actually had an index card nearly finished that was just concentric circles of patterned paper; and then I saw the off-cuts... circle slivers of various size, looking like funky broken piecharts and I immediately peeled everything off and changed direction!!! 

(& that is what ICAD is all about, imo!)

Day 50: Off-Prompt

Today's prompt was "Note to Self" and since mine was to clear my worktable off enough that the precarious piles were not threatened every time I got up to get something, I made a Clean-Up Collage from some of the many and various discarded bits thereon.

Day 51: Off-Prompt

Commemorating, in ICAD form, the amazing layered rainbow fruit salad we had last night. I did not include the yummy vanilla yogurt sauce, but feel free to imagine it!

Day 52: Weathervane

This eclectic collage has stickers, ancient rub-ons (that surprisingly still worked perfectly?!) part of a sewing pattern, wide washi tape and an American Eagle handsome enough to be (one suspects) a bit of a Weather VAIN...

Day 53: Museum

I *LOVE* museums! Big or small ones; wide-ranging or super-specific; traditional or modern; art museums, historical societies, botanic gardens... I'm there. My friend Barbara and I have built entire vacations around attending a specific exhibition in a far-flung city; @smilynstef and I devote a significant portion of every NYC trip to seeing what's on in our favorite museums. None of this has ANYTHING to do with my card, which features flower stickers on vintage paper, set off with washi tape frames; though the super-dense arrangement does bring to mind the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia.

♥♥♥

ICAD, Week 7

The NJ weather is pretty warm, but the Index Card inspiration on Instagram (aka #dyicad2023 hashtag) is red hot! Here are my cards from the past week:

Day 40: Mandala Monday

It's an Ink-Over-Collage Mandala Monday, featuring some of my favorite, extra-vivid Simon Hurley create inks, including Clear Skies, Later Gator, Shooting Star, Remember Me, Prom Dress and Roar!

Day 41: Off-Prompt

A surprising proportion of my collages are composed based on color; in this case cerulean blue and sunshine yellow. On a vintage library catalog card.

Day 42: Off-Prompt

Freeform funky flower doodles on a smooshed background of  Wendy Vecchi Archival Inks.

Day 43: Patina

Quite a loose take on today’s prompt of #PATINA because usually rust isn’t blue… 

(Ok yes, busted: this is basically just an excuse to sequentially smoosh some of my favorite Wendy Vecchi Archival Inks, including Night Sky, Prickly Pear, Sky Blue, Leaf Green and Morning Glory; and doodle with Ranger's Letter It Metallic Markers.)

Day 44: Wabi Sabi

Several years ago, during ICAD, was the first time I had ever heard of Wabi Sabi (the Japanese ethos of embracing the inevitable decay and perfect imperfection of the physical world) and the first image that I consciously recognized as being Wabi Sabi happened to be a crumbling brick wall with some vines growing randomly out of the mortar. Since then, I think I've made a Wabi Sabi Brick Wall card every year; and here's the 2023 version: handcut patterned paper bricks, pink index card mortar and stapled on wonky leaves. Not gonna lie... I really love this one! 

Day 45: Repeat

Pretty sure the "REPEAT" prompt was not intended as an invitation to repeat my favorite technique of a random collage featuring a historical lady, a sewing pattern layout, S & H Greenstamps, sheetmusic and found text (topped off with a few sticker butterflies) but... that's how I chose to interpret it!

Day 46: Millefleur

Millefleur is French for a thousand flowers, and has its origins in Medieval tapestries, where the foreground would have figures, animals or structures and the background would be filled in with lots of tiny plants and flowers, usually surrounded by green. Nowadays a millefleur pattern can be taken more loosely to be any allover pattern with smallish plants and/or flowers. In Italian, Millefiori also means a thousand flowers and generally refers to millefiori glasswork which comprises a bunch of glass canes all fused together and then sliced to resemble a sort of mosaic, vaguely floral, pattern. My card has very loose fleurs painted in some of my favorite Wendy Vecchi Archival Inks (Orange Blossom, Cornflower, Violet, Night Sky and Carnation) then outlined and detailed with Letter It Fineliners.

Week Six: Index Card a Day

Summer always seems to fly by at record speed, especially in June and July when we ICAD-ians are knee-deep in index cards and inspiration! Here's what I made this week:

Day 33: Mandala Monday

This weekend, Tammy G reminded me how much I love One Staple Collages, so I decided to celebrate Mandala Monday with a One Staple Mandala! My mandala layers are constructed of a library catalog card painted by my friend Mary and gelprints made by Gina and Linda (which they used to wrap some pretty fab birthday presents) enhanced with the newest set of Dina Wakley Collage Papers, Jumbled Letters, from Ranger and the dragonfly is from the biggest and coolest sticker book that Stephanie gave me. 

(Of which more later...) 

Day 34: Summer

Fresh strawberries are one of my very favorite summertime treats; I don't think I could even count how many of them I ate during the month of June. So when I found this cool pattern for adding an appliqued berry to knitwear, I couldn't resist a strawberrycentric collage.

Day 35: Astronomy

Inspired by today's prompt, I was randomly blending some of my new Simon Hurley create. Inks from Ranger, going for a sort of Aurora Borealis effect... and then... it turned into an abstract doodle. 'Cause that's the way I roll! 

Day 36: Imaginary

I'm taking an #IMAGINARY trip to Oahu, thanks to this fun hibiscus doodle, painted with some of my favorite Wendy Vecchi Archival Inks... Peachy Keen and Rosey Posey; with a little Viridian added in on the foliage. Did you know that the official State Flower of Hawaii is specifically the yellow hibiscus? So these are just "backup blossoms" then, but they were fun to paint and doodle! 

Day 37: Off-Prompt

Would you believe I had already made this torn paper collage background BEFORE Stephanie gave me the Botanists Sticker Anthology, the amazing book I referred to on Mandala Monday, which has hundreds and hundreds of gorgeous realistic plant and flower stickers.  

Day 38: Zodiac

My western Zodiac sign is Cancer and it's not that I have anything against crabs, but I confess I prefer my Chinese Zodiac sign, the dragon! This one came from the amazing Pearl River Emporium in NYC's Chinatown, he... (or she? it's hard to tell with dragons!) ...is perched atop a repro library card, adorned with a page from a Chinese zodiac calendar, and a little postage on the side.

Day 39: Levels

Funky (dotty!) flower doodles, made with my Zig Clean Color Dot Markers, from that late great bastion of NYC crafting... The Ink Pad! I like that the gridded card makes them sort of look like the coolest bar graph EVER!

ICAD: Week 5

We hit the halfway point of the Index Card a Day project this week, we're rounding the corner and heading into July, woohoo. If you're still chugging along, well done, keep going! If you've fallen behind, no big deal... just re-start! No catching up, no judgement, no nothing; re-start and do as much as you can, when you can. I know we talk a lot about 61 cards and "daily art practice" but the important part (imo!) is the commitment, not the numbers. If you were having fun and found it valuable, just come back! 

Day 26: Mandala Monday

I've "stretched" this mandala a bit, horizontally... to fit the 3x5 shape; but it's more or less symmetrical, thanks to my gridded index card, from the big box office supply store, last year!

Day 27: Indigo

Is it just me, or does my free-range organic leafy doodle look a bit like an #INDIGO version of Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors??! Feeeeeeeeeed me, Seymour!

Day 28: Asanoha Pattern

Every summer there a couple of ICAD prompts that I have to Google, and this is one of those! I hadn't heard of an asanoha pattern and it turned out to be harder to draw than I had expected. It took me two tries: the denser one is more accurate but somehow harder to see; the looser one is not technically the exact repeat (the spaces between are uneven) but it's quite pretty. Both were made using my Zig Clean Color Dot Markers, from that late great bastion of NYC crafting... The Ink Pad! ♥

Day 29: Evergreen

Sometimes I have a pretty firm plan for ICAD, and sometimes I just wing it. 

(Can you guess which this is?)

Day 30: Carnival

I started with a very abstract idea of a carnival... bright lights, bunting, lots of color ...and had a lot of fun painting curvy shapes with half a dozen shades of Wendy Vecchi's Archival Inks and a waterbrush full of rubbing alcohol. Alternatively, this represents what my plumage would look like if I were a bird! :)

Day 31: Charcoal

A very literal take on charcoal: it's briquettes! If charcoal briquettes were multilayered and machine stitched and ummmmm... plaid? K, maybe not that literal...

Day 32: Off-Prompt

This vintage book of different types of knitting stitches is in Japanese and is printed in monotones, but instead of black and white the sections are blue, green, brown and purple. (The purple is my favorite.) That scrap of sheet music already had stars stamped on (in Antique Linen Distress Ink, I think?) Instructions for the Pekinese stitch came from a very tattered vintage embroidery pamphlet. I composed this by making the lines in the various papers intersect in interesting ways; but then it needed one more element. The butterflies were the right shape, size and color. And that's probably as close as I can get to explaining my process for making a collage!

♥♥♥

Week 4: ICAD Round-Up

Heading into the official start of summer, with lots more index card artistry!

Day 19: Mandala Monday

It's a vintage collage Mandala Monday featuring some beautiful Hindi text; a dandelion-related library catalog card and illustration from a gardening book; and punched circles from two different colors of index cards.

Day 20: Tranquility

O is for Ocean, which is the first thing that came to mind when I thought about the #dyicad2023 Day 20 prompt, #TRANQUILITY ...so I got out all of my blue brush markers and made some waves.

Day 21: Postage Stamp

Putting the "mental" into "experimental" on with a Glue-as-You-Go collage, featuring one cent stamps plus floral washi stickers plus a few flower illustrations cut from an old, falling-apart gardening book. It's not perfect... (wish I had left more white space on the card in the postage layer!) ...but it's not bad. The point of the "Glue as You Go" collage exercise is to work loosely, commit to each element without dry-fitting or having a firm plan for what's next. You don't always get a finished piece you love, but it helps you become more confident that you can fix/adapt/improve on the fly and it's a great way to learn how to analyze what works and what doesn't; which will help you out a lot the next time! Perfect for ICAD really... 

Day 22: Unexpected

Rating the elements of this ICAD for their Unexpectedness Levels:

Pink + Yellow Color Palette: 2/10 (pretty expected)

Jaunty Random Stacked Triangles: 7/10 (kinda unexpected)

Handcut Goldfish: 11/10 (did NOT see that coming!)

Day 23: Enchanted Forest

...or in this case... Enchanted Florist! More painting + doodling with my Wendy Vecchi Archival Inks. One at a time, I smooshed three of my favorite (blend-friendly) colors (Rosey Posey, Bluebird and Sunflower) onto a craft sheet... spritzed with rubbing alcohol... and dipped the card into the ink. I repeated a few times with each color until I had a nice mix of blended and unblended color. After it was dry, I "looked for" the centers of the flowers in the random ink splotches and outlined them. Then I added concentric, rose-like petals. Then (this is the vital part!) I did Wendy's trick for turning a simple line drawing into a fun and whimsical doodle, which is to ADD A SECOND SET OF LINES! Simple... but it really really makes all the difference. I'd write more but you probably want to go try this for yourself and I don't want to slow ya down...   

Day 24: Bubble

During a two month project like ICAD it's important to acknowledge that some days we have more time and energy than others. My strategies for low-energy days include: embracing my comfort zone activities; "copying" something I've made before; and revisiting my favorite prompts. Conversely, on high-energy days I tackle more ambitious ideas and if I'm really on a roll, I might work ahead and make more than one card at a sitting. But honestly, part of the point of a daily art practice is learning that it IS possible to make art on days you're not particularly inspired; and accepting the fact that a few days of making art you don't love is not the end of the world. In fact, sometimes that "spectacular failure" you were embarrassed about... it might turn out to be the doorway to a really great innovation, two weeks later. We're nearly halfway through ICAD and all I can say is KEEP GOING! If you've missed a few days, re-start without worrying about catching up. The exact number of cards you complete and/or the date you finish is not the crucial thing, I promise! 

(PS: My easy, peasy take on the Bubble prompt consists of handcut, stacked, patterned paper circles on a vintage library catalog card.)

Day 25: Dictionary

A super-simple card with just a few elements: An orange and the characters for orange from a very fun set of Chinese language flashcards my friend Liz gave me; a bright yellow index card; the definition of orange from an old, falling-apart English dictionary and from the same source... a total bonus... the "OPQ" tab from the dictionary which fell off its page while I was putting the book away!

(ALWAYS embrace serendipity, that's my motto!)

♥♥♥

I'll be back next week with another ICAD Round-Up, in the meantime, I post these daily on my Instagram Account and my previous Round-Ups can be found under the ICAD Blog Label.

Index Card Round Up: Week 3

Still loving the freedom of making a completely random piece of art on an index card each day, with no pressure to end up with a perfect finished piece... just playing and trying different ideas!

Day 12: Glyph (sorta)

A somewhat tangential take on yesterday's "GLYPH" which has several meanings in various contexts, but "a hieroglyphic character or symbol; a pictograph" probably sums up the general idea best. I got an entire little booklet of safety icon stickers for less than a dollar on a mega-thrifting excursion with my friend Heather last year, and ever since I've been meaning to use them in a sticker mandala. And now I have! :)

Day 13: Superstition

Tuesday the 13th isn't (as far as I know) a source of superstition anywhere, but I still love that Tammy G elected to imbue this prompt with a bit of numerical significance. My handcut and paperpieced rendition of a black cat is placed against a full moon, thus also giving a tangential nod to the MOONLIGHT prompt from yesterday.

Day14: Typewriter

I am lucky enough to own a few vintage typewriters and I love using them to add text to cards and collages; also... they're pretty cool for staging. The typewriter on the index card is a Remington clipped from a slightly grainy 1940's magazine advertisement, it's surrounded by random lines from a typing textbook and the word "daisy" stamped in a typewriter font. I typed "daisy" repeatedly over an illustration of daisies, then fussycut and added them to the index card. The typewriter in the photo is my 1952(ish) Smith Corona portable, with beautiful two-toned green keys.

Day 15: Sea Glass

I wasn't entirely sure where I was going when I started painting random shapes in blues and greens. When I was done painting, I wondered if I should outline them? When they were outlined, I wondered if I should add doodles? I try not so succumb to, "What if I wreck it?" anxiety, but let's face it, we ALL feel that way sometimes, so here's my top secret strategy: Each time you get to a place where you fear you might "wreck it"... take a photo! Then fearlessly take the next step! 

(All of my favorite blue and green shades of Wendy Vecchi Archival Inks, painted using a waterbrush full of isopropyl alcohol. Outlined and doodled upon with Ranger Letter It Fineliner Pens.)

Day 16: Alphabet

Here's an example where I loved the idea... but not necessarily the finished card. My concept for #ALPHABET was to handletter a (repro) library card, then add found text to each letter. There's not particularly anything WRONG with the result, it's just somehow *not* quite what I was hoping for. If and when I figure out why not, you'll probably see another version. In the meantime, Day 16 was a triumph of process if not outcome, which is what ICAD is all about!

Day 17: Sunflower

About as literal as you can possibly get, just layers and layers of handcut patterned paper petals around a brown center, with a little machine stitching to hold it all together.

  

Day 18: Off Prompt

Every year of ICAD there are a couple of prompts I need to Google, and in 2015 or so, one of those was "OGEE" which turned out to be a style of pattern that I knew and liked, but never realized it had a specific name, lol. Since then, I've drawn or paper-pieced an index card version each summer, and here's the latest version, handcut from patterned paper scraps and machine-stitched for extra texture and durability!