ICAD = daily art making

I'm glad to say I have jumped onto the index card a day challenge. It runs right through June and July and you can find out all about it at the daisy yellow blog. I've been uploading all my ICADs to my flickr stream, so you can see them all there. Here are a few selected ones. 

This was my first, a warm up card I made in May, and a reminder to me to enjoy the process and not to make it a chore - which is how my art making has felt this year.

Tammy (daisy yellow) provides daily prompts and weekly themes which you can use or ignore. 

This one was for the pyramid prompt. Most of the time so far I've been working with gouache. I have a pile of gardening books out of the library at the moment and kept thinking I should do some drawings from those - so this is the perfect opportunity. I have a bunch of index cards done now based on those books ...and probably still more to go on this theme. 

What's working for me is that the commitment is small - a little gouache sketch can be finished in 5 minutes, but it makes me feel like I'm making a tiny bit of progress each day. Because it's a small commitment it means there's less pressure on the result, yesterday I did two attempts at the same image and don't like either of them, but who cares it was 10 minutes wasted (or not, maybe something learned, maybe in a few weeks I'll look back and see something of value in them). Today is a new day and a new card. 

What's exciting is that some of these little playful things are turning into 'real' work. I've been inspired to make four little gardening theme lino prints, just in the nick of time, to be included in the memory, dream, mythexhibition which opens today at Tactile Arts (photos of these to follow!)

Hopefully I haven't jinxed the whole process by writing about it! I'm excited to see what comes out in the next month or so.....