Tag: skill building

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The Last of ICAD 2018

I finished it!  Almost a year and a half late, but my quest of the index-card-a-day challenge from 2018 is at an end.  Week 8 (prompts: radio, mint, postage, cassette tape, tide pool, circuit or network, typewriter):

Week 9 (prompts: twister, favorite color, staple, wish, telescope):

These little daily challenges are great exercises in many ways.  They also prove the theory that you have to make a lot of stuff to get decent at art, and a fair amount of what you make isn’t good.  So, is bad art still art?  It exists, but should it?  Many of my cards are terrible.  There are a few gems, and some that I could have done better, but I won’t re-do those.  I am keeping all of my ICAD efforts, and over the winter I will make fabric boxes to hold each year’s cards.

I am going to forge ahead and finish the cards for the first year I tried the challenge, 2017, but I won’t post my efforts as frequently.  I don’t think that I will stick to the one-a-day pace that I set for finishing 2018 (not to mention that I should have done one card a day when the challenge was current).   On Thursday, some thoughts on my fabric collage boxes.

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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.

 

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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.

 

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Considering Composition

Good design is important in the making of any artwork.  The elements of design are the visual art equivalents to grammar, spelling and punctuation in writing.  Take a look at these two images that I took of the same landscape:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Which one makes a stronger overall composition?  Consider each image as a whole, then break down the parts and compare the location of each part in the two images – the pine tree, the graves, the shadows.  Are the elements balanced in relation to each other?  Does the distance of the objects have any effect on the overall image?  What about the use of space – the size of the grassy lawn, the different gravestones in each image.  What objects are emphasized in the two images?  To sum things up, which one is more interesting to look at?  Which one holds your interest more than the other?  These are all things to consider when making and original piece of art, whether it is abstract or representational.

Meanwhile, I am having fun with this week’s index cards, check in on Tuesday to see the results.

 

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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?