Why you should join this year's Index-Card-a-Day challenge

It's that time again!  Tammy, of Daisy Yellow fame, is hosting her third annual index-card-a-day challenge.

   

Her first challenge started just a few months after I started blogging.  I was new and green and eager, and let me tell you, this challenge changed my life.  I don't say that lightly.  I made an index card every single day from June 1st - October 1st.  

It set up a daily creativity habit that lasted well over a year.  

It made me figure out how to post pictures to flickr so I could join the flickr ICAD group. Once there, I started connecting with wonderful artists and bloggers who quickly turned into friends.  It gave me something to blog about at a time where I had lots of blogging energy, but little blogging fodder.  I gained skills and confidence, as an artist, a writer, and member of a community.

This year's challenge runs from June 1st - July 31st.  I can't recommend this challenge enough.

Go here to read all about it.

And since I already said it so well 2 years ago, I'm re-posting all the things I love about this challenge.

(originally posted July 8, 2011)

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We're more than a month into the index-card-a-day summer challenge and I absolutely love it. Every once in a while I think "I'm too tired to make a card". But then I remind myself ANYTHING GOES - even a scribble on a white card that says "I'm too tired to make a card". So I sit down to dash something off, and immediately find myself absorbed and energized and I usually end up making something far better than I expected.

The size of the card is so perfect for me. Big pages are intimidating. I love to paint backgrounds, but then what? how to fill them? I don't do a lot of writing in my journals so after a few words and images I'm stuck with "what now?" Never a problem with the index card.

But ohmygod, on the other hand - the inchie? Have you ever tried something that small? I thought I was going to love it because I'm drawn to miniature. Boy was I wrong. I find it nearly impossible to make a piece of art that small. I'm very comfortable making a bigger piece and cutting it into one inch squares, but that's cheating. Creating an original piece of art in that small space just isn't happening. But the index card! ah...the index card. It's just right. Big enough to collage, big enough for a decent background painting, big enough for SOME text. But no cavernous empty spaces. Not as much oddly placed, disjointed images and me scratching my head wondering how to integrate them into a whole.

And it's just stiff enough to withstand globs of paint and glue and layers of paper. But so cheap that if I totally mess it up I have no qualms about pitching it and starting over. And no worries about measuring and cutting to precise sizes (I refuse to pay for those pre-packaged ATCs because really - how hard is it to run some water color paper through the paper trimmer? except it IS kind of a pain in the neck and just one more step to go through before I can actually make something). I love that there's a whole package of them just sitting there on my worktable. If I'm having so much fun with one, I can grab another, and another. No waiting, no measuring, no cutting, no "saving my good paper for something really special"- grab and go.

I love the community of fellow ICADers. The flickr pool is so much fun. Amazing work, huge variety, loads of inspiration and support.

Some cards mean something, some cards don't. Some days it just feels good to smoosh the paint around. Some days it's a full day of stress packed into 3x5 inches. Every day it feels good to take a few minutes to create.

Even the cards that don't mean anything capture a time and a place. They reflect my interests and skills as an artist. I know that I will look back on this collection and have powerful memories of the summer of 2011.

Huge shout out and thanks to Tammy at Daisy Yellow for challenging us, inspiring us, and cheering us on. I'm so glad I'm playing along!

Avoidance 101

So far, I have been really enjoying the "Extreme Composition" class I'm taking on-line with Jane Davies.  The exercises have been challenging, but fun.  I've been eager to work on what I've learned and wishing there were more hours in the day to practice.

Until last week.

Last week it was time to dive into part 2 of lesson 2 and I froze.

Lesson 2 is all about shape.

Part one of the lesson involved finding as many different ways as possible to make shapes, and then to do some simple compositions/explorations using only black, white and grey.

This part was fun - loose, no pressure explorations.

 

 

It was all experimentation without judgment - exploring combinations of shapes, their relation to each other and to the page.  It didn't matter whether I liked my results or not.

The assignment for part 2 of the lesson was to create compositions (in color) using two shapes and a line.  I didn't think this was going to be very hard - I expected more of my free-wheeling attitude from part 1.  But days went by without me working on it.  At first I could pretend I didn't have time to work on it, but somehow I managed to find 3 hours to spend on the internet, so I couldn't use that excuse.

Every time I thought of the lesson, I had a little flutter of anxiety - I have no good ideas, I don't know how to approach this, I can't see anything other than what's already been done by my fellow students and I don't want to copy them...

Meanwhile, lesson three had been posted and it was all about color, and it looked like SO MUCH FUN. I was rationalizing that I could just skip this last part of lesson 2 and move on so that I didn't fall behind.  That's when it really hit me that I was avoiding this lesson.  I have a life long habit of avoiding the difficult and uncomfortable.  It's a habit that holds me back, is counter-productive and can sabotage my success.  The work of my 40s has been confronting and trying to break that pattern.

When I saw myself fall into the same old trap, I got pissed off at myself and that anger was enough to make me do the work.

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A few of these pieces I like a lot.  Some I downright loathe.  Most are just “meh.”  But that’s not really the point. 

This class has brought me face to face with my fear and I’ve come to some realizations.

When I started making art a few years ago, I was somehow willing to accept that my work wasn’t going to be great out of the gate.  I largely kept the critic at bay, and just practiced, practiced, practiced.  The sheer joy of creation was enough, and I had faith that daily creativity would improve my technical skills.  And it did.  And I hit a stretch of being really pleased with my results and with how far I’d come.

Are you familiar with this great quote from radio host (and total nerd crush) Ira Glass?

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

This was revelatory when I first read it.  It made so much sense and helped so much.

Now all of a sudden, for the last few months, I’ve been mildly dissatisfied with almost everything I’ve made.  I haven’t really been able to put my finger on it, but it’s been frustrating.

This week’s class experience made me realize that my vision (or taste) has outstripped my skills again, and I’m going to have to go through another period of hard work to try and close that gap.  And I will probably have to go through this again and again because as my skills grow, I see my potential and my dreams start to race ahead of me.

Putting it in this context makes it all okay again.  I am tuning in and paying attention to this fear and frustration – it’s showing me that I’m on my way somewhere new.  I will tolerate this discomfort, suspend judgment, and just show up and do the work.

(and with a profound sense of relief I move on to lesson 3!)

Jake is ready for his close-up

I had some help setting up my portable photo studio today.

Collage class

There are so many things I haven't shown you lately.

I've been taking a weekly collage class with a local artist/friend for the past 10 weeks.

Three glorious hours in her sweet little studio with just two other students.

It's been wonderful.

Week one we played with distressing and painting magazine pages, and we also did some simple mono-printing on rice paper.  Here are two collages I made incorporating those papers

The next week we worked on a triptych, which turned into this piece:

The task of another week was to work in shades of white:

 We collaged on tiles another week:

and we used aluminum foil over various textured objects to create collages like this one:

The absolute best part of class was learning a little bit about encaustics.

My first attempt is kind of a chaotic mess, but it was really really fun to make.  We used 12x12 wood panels as our base and it's got all kinds of layers of paper and wax.

(The circles are prints we made on rice paper using wood from cut trees.)

 

I tried something more simple for this one.  I didn't use any collage papers at all, and simply stuck to painting color blocks with the encaustic paints. Not awesome, but a great learning experience.

 

I'm falling in love with wax, and really want to explore it more fully.

This last one makes me really really happy.

 

I'm sad that class is over, but I know I'll be back.

It's been incredibly rewarding to learn and create on a regular basis with an intimate group.

And you, without question, know your first love is your last.

When Ria invited me to join a "Favorite Artist" post card swap, I jumped to say yes without an inkling of what I would create.

Then I started to panic.

I have a really hard time picking favorites.  Music has always played a huge role in my life and I have a million favorites.  How on earth could I select just one for a postcard?

After completely over thinking this for weeks, I decided to go back to my first and greatest love:  The Who.

As I contemplated my card, all I could picture was a silhouette of Pete Townshend's iconic "windmill" style of guitar playing.  How could I use this on a postcard when I really can't draw?

Clearly this was the perfect excuse to buy the heated stencil cutter I've been wanting:

I printed a picture from the internet, placed a transparency on top and traced Pete's outline.

The tool worked really well, even on all the little curvy parts.

I was positively giddy when I tested the stencil.

How awesome is that?

Here's my finished postcard - album covers in the background, the ubiquitous target symbol from their early years, white modeling paste pushed through another hand-carved stencil of the band's logo, and my beloved Pete stenciled over the top.

 This swap brought out my full-on, fan-girl geekiness.

It was incredibly satisfying.

 

I think Pete's going to find his way on to a lot of envelopes in the coming weeks.

I put him to good use on the envelope I sent to Ria.

'nuff said.