Tag: daily project

Posted on by

Debating Daily Projects

I have been having a discussion with myself lately about all of these daily or weekly projects that I am working on now, or that I have attempted in the past.  Daily creative projects are great ways to discipline oneself into a creative habit, try new things, work out design problems and generate new ideas.  However, I have been taking much longer than I should to complete my daily efforts.  I get so wrapped up in the little daily things that I am not putting time into bigger projects that will be for sale or get entered into art shows.

The little daily stuff is just for me, which is still important, but not the only thing in my creative world.  I don’t want to give them up, as the index card challenge has been a great learning experience, and I want to complete the past years that I started – that was a goal I set for myself, and there are so many goals that I have not met.  I wonder how much more I would have grown creatively by now had I known about these little daily art doses in college or even high school.

Since I have not been stitching at all lately, I picked up the 4×4″ daily project again to get back into the needle and thread.  Here are all the squares that I have done since attempting the challenge back in September:

Some winners, some not, I have learned from them all.  Now I am behind again on the index card goal, and I managed to bring home five more books from the library to read.  I am very glad I have all of these things to do.

 

Posted on by

ICAD 2018, Week 6

A very quick post, I wanted to get this out yesterday, trying to keep up with getting caught up!  The prompts for this batch of index card creations are: pretzel, poetry, palette, pixelated, pinball, portrait and plate.

The card for pretzel was an experiment, I simply made layers of three colors by putting real mini pretzels on the card and spraying them with Marabu acrylic spray paint.  I like the effect, and I’ll be paying with those paints more in the future.  For the poetry card, I cut out a few lines of text from magazine articles and filled in with my own words.  Palette was simply blots of acrylic paint in one of my signature color combinations of purple, green and yellow.  Finally, the pinball card was a pleasant surprise.  After looking at images of pinball machines online, and studying the photorealism paintings of Charles Bell, I cut shapes out of colored paper, layering them to imitate the pinball graphics, and added details with gel pen.

More tomorrow, some sort of stitching.

 

Posted on by

Even More of Those Crazy Index Cards!

I just keep going, week five from 2018 is done!  The prompts were: patisserie, tarot or playing card, curtain, compass, denim/blue, picnic and mosaic.

I remember while attempting the challenge last year, that this week was the one that derailed me.  I completed patisserie, playing card and compass, and let myself get hopelessly stuck on the rest of them.  It almost happened again in my bid to belatedly finish the bunch.  The remaining four cards that I needed to make to finish week five, I did in the last day and a half.  Yes, I know, the point of a daily project is to do a little, well, daily… I’ve said it before, starting and maintaining a good habit can be just as difficult as stopping and staying off of a bad one.  I must admit, in the end, the card in this group that I had the most trouble starting is the one that I like the best –  the one on the far right, for “curtain.”

On Thursday, maybe some stitching, maybe some other rambling.

Posted on by

More ICAD, from 2018

A quick post today… I have made some progress filling in the missing cards in my attempt at the 2018 index-card-a-day challenge.  Again, some days, I made a card like I was supposed to, other days, I skipped.  Sometimes I didn’t make the time to do the card, other days I just didn’t want to deal with the prompt.  Now, over a year later, I am determined to make something for all of the prompts.

Week three prompts were sea green, super hero, path, suitcase, legend, “greetings from” and treasure.  I especially like how that “greetings from” card turned out.  That one was inspired by vintage large letter postcards.

Week four was sky, castle, the Jetsons, tangerine, meerkat, magic carpet and garden.  Will I keep this momentum going?

Posted on by

Other Creative Paths

Creative stitching has not been happening in my world lately.  I’m trying not to get too worked up over this, as the days have gone by and I cannot get them back.  However, I have been creative in other ways – food.  Last week at my nearby produce auction, I purchased two gigantic heads of Chinese cabbage.  So far, I have made wonton soup (heavy on the cabbage), started a batch of kimchi (something I have always wanted to try making) and homemade egg rolls.  I still have one head of cabbage.  The soup and egg rolls were delicious, the kimchi has to ferment some days longer.  I don’t know what I will do with the second head, I must get to it quickly.  So my creative energy has gone in a different direction, much to the delight of my taste buds.  There is no reason why creativity shouldn’t affect all aspects of our lives.

Looking forward, I still have not picked up my goal of finishing the index-card-a-day challenges from 2018 and 2017.  I’m not going to go into great depths into this project here, other than to report my progress.  Here are the first two weeks from 2018, I managed to keep with the challenge at the time.

Prompts: roller coaster, fireworks, tilt-a-whirl, Ferris wheel, line/queue, carousel, haunted house.

Prompts: zebra, chevron, trap door, coffee or tea, magic wand, cobblestone, flamingo.

I managed to complete four of the cards for week three when I was supposed to (summer 2018).  Will I get the remaining three cards done by next Tuesday?