Tag: skill building

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Drawing to Sound

I’m back!  Well, I never left, but I have been making things.  I am pleased to report that today is the last day of the 2020 Index-Card-a-Day Challenge, and I have finished all of them!  I will post more about the end of this year’s ICAD next week, because now I want to show my attempts at creating to music.

My tastes in music are quite eclectic, so it is difficult to find something that am not familiar with.  The Hoopla app (should be available through your local library) has a meager offering of some world music, and there I found a recording of Australian digeridoo music.  That is what I chose for my creative experiment.  I decided to make my musical sketch on an 8.5 x 11” piece of dark gray textured paper, using gel sticks, crayons, colored pencils and oil pastels to make my marks.

After getting everything in place, I started the music and listened for a few minutes, choosing colors, making an effort to select colors that I don’t normally use.  Then, I started drawing lines, trying to imagine my hand connecting to the sound and taking over my movements.

I kept going, filling in shapes and adding marks.  I think that you can see how the red waves and orange scribbles were in response to the undulating drone of the digeridoo, while the blue bars, white dots and yellow slashes came from the sounds of sticks tapping together.

Finally, I added more shading and bulked up the composition with some brighter colors.

This could be a great creative block smasher, I will be making a point to doodle or sketch to music more often in my art journals.  As luck would have it, one of the last prompts for the 2020 ICAD challenge was “Bossa Nova.”  Hoopla again saved the day with several Bossa Nova titles, and here is what came out of my mind:

Next week, (yes, I will post next week, I promise) the ICAD wrap up and moving on to something else.

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Getting out of 2017 and into 2020

Yes!  I finished the 2017 ICAD challenge, and I am so far keeping up with the 2020 challenge.  Here is what I churned out in the past few weeks to close out 2017:

Week 7 prompts: lyrics, denim or blue, night sky, love, layers, intersection, charm bracelet.

Week 8: sun or moon, swim, adjective, mirror, greetings from…, sepia, ghost or zombie.

Week 9: spring, summer, autumn, winter, sunset.

On Tuesdays through the next two months, I will post my progress on the ICAD challenge.  My goals for this year are to try combining art media and truly explore mixed media more and to make an art quilt inspired by one of my index cards.  Of course, the quilt will happen after the challenge ends.  For my mixed media goal this week, I have combined stamping, collage and lettering; ink drawing and watercolor pencil; fabric, stitching and paint; iron-on thread and paint; collage and watercolor pencil.  The prompts for week one were hopscotch, marigold, album, sequins, 1980s, dreamcatcher and highway.  It is not too late to pick up the challenge, why not give it a try?

Finally, I’m still rolling along with my 4×4” squares.  Here are the ones from May:

Onward to something else on Thursday, see you then!

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Close to Finishing…

It looks like I am on track to finish the index card collages from 2017 by May 31, in time to immediately start the annual challenge for 2020 on June 1.  As I look around my sewing room, I am realizing that these side challenges get finished at the expense of other projects, but the important thing is that I am still making something, reinforcing a daily creative habit, and learning more about materials, composition and design along the way.  Those are all good things that will positively influence my bigger projects.

Here are the cards from 2017 Week 5, prompts were polka dots, gyroscope, faux wallpaper, desert or dessert, orange, Fourth of July, favorite type of apple.

Week 6, prompts were perfume, kaomoji or emoji, charcoal, ampersand, steampunk, roots, onomatopoeia.

Coming soon, I will have some more musings on music to visual art, thoughts on combining vastly different influences, of course the 2020 ICAD challenge, and so much more in the upcoming weeks.

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Those Index Cards Again!

Well, I got a bit lost in creative projects over the past couple of weeks!  Among all the other things I am attempting, I am frantically finishing up a project from 2017.  That was the first year that I attempted the annual Index-Card-a-Day challenge.  It did not go well for me.  I started late, managed the daily creation of a collage on an index card for about one and a half weeks, then I wandered off.  The challenge ran for two months.  The time is near for the 2020 edition of ICAD to start (June 1), so this month I am trying to finish what I started three years ago.  I fared a little better with my ICAD completion rate in 2018, and I was even more disciplined last year.  I have all the cards for the past two years finished.  I don’t know why I waited so long to finish the 2017 cards.  Here is what I have so far from the 2017 challenge.

Week One – prompts: sunrise, lost and/or found, vintage, lavender, kawaii/cute, detour, alliteration

Week Two – paint chips, ombre, sunshine yellow, tetrahedron, wings, echo/repeat, leaves

Week Three – starburst, rainbow, sprout, alphabetize, gear/gadget, yin/yang, simplicity

Week Four – vanishing point, Alice in Wonderland, caravan/RV, portrait, green, farm, dashboard

I’m off to create, I have a long way to go.

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Working Through Challenges

Using vintage linens and working in a collage style presents some challenging problems.  Certain traditional quilt methods of assembly just don’t work well with my creative visions and materials of choice.  If you’ve visited my booth at a quilt show, you’ll know that I sell quite a few dyed vintage damask table linens.  Many of them have a nice finished edge that I want to preserve while using them in a collage.  I am still trying to come up with an easy way to bind all the layers and not lose that finished edge.  Today, I am embarking on my latest attempt at this quest.

Starting with a medium size dyed damask napkin that will be the base of the collage, I picked out a couple of smaller squares on which to stitch scrap compositions.  These smaller squares will be similar to the 4 x 4” square that I have been featuring in previous posts.  The next step was to select scraps to add to the little squares:

I pulled out more scraps than I’ll be able to use in this project, but that’s OK – it is good to have more to choose from during the early planning stages.  Next, I started working with the wool square.  Several little scraps jumped out at me, and the placement of them came together quickly.

Notice that all the pieces are separate from each other.  How would they look with a piece of fabric underneath (other than the background) that connected them together?

I like the second version, the additional piece of fabric adds another layer of interest.  I’m going to take a look at some trims and funky yarns to add, as I think I’m ready to start stitching this one over the next couple of days.

I invite you to follow along in my quest over the next week or so, will this work out, or be a dead end?  This will also be another look into my creative process.