ICAD 2018
Index-Card-A-Day (ICAD) 2018 is coming. As always, this is a challenge I support and encourage the Creativity Matters Podcast community to do. The ICAD Challenge hosted by Tammy of Daisy Yellow runs through June and July and involves creating 61 daily index cards. What goes on your cards is totally up to you. There are prompts available for each day of the challenge, but using the prompts is optional. You may want to explore a theme. Or you may want to focus on a medium, or a color range, or some combination of techniques. Or you may just want to do “something” each day and see what happens. Pretty much anything goes as long as you use either a 3×5 or 4×6 index card as the “paper” (substrate).
I have been “drawing” ICAD since my first one. In early years, that was definitely an outsider approach, but it was my approach. In the last few years, there have been many other people doing ICAD who draw, and in 2017 there were even other people who did portraits throughout the challenge. It is great that the challenge has gotten the attention of artists with a wide range of interests.
In 2017, I did a series of 61 portraits in ballpoint. It was a wonderful process and an important series for me. I would have done the drawings anyway, but probably not on index cards! Doing these drawings as part of a community challenge provided a good rubric to keep me pushing at both the subject and the medium. I was new to portraits and completely new to ballpoint. It was a good learning experience all around, and my thoughts on drawing “what I love” and in my own way led to many philosophical blog posts and podcast discussions last summer.
There have been many podcasts and posts on the CMP about ICAD. You can find some of these resources listed below to help fuel your inspiration and even to provide background noise as you work on your own art in coming days.
For official information about ICAD, visit the ICAD Challenge page on the Daisy Yellow site.
Podcasts
- Episode 238: Goat
- Episode 248: Then and Now
- Episode 245: Thanks, Mom
- Episode 245: Love What You Do
- Episode 185: Tracking Teddy (this inspired the “stuffed things” theme I stared with in 2016
- Episode 187: One Sentence
- Episode 188: The Noisy Paintbox
- Episode 189: Raven (Tammy guests in this episode to talk about ICAD)
- Episode 193: First Lines
Blog Posts (just a few hand-picked posts… not all!)
- Index-Card-a-Day 2017 (pre-challenge notes)
- ICAD 2016 (pre-challenge notes)
- ICAD 2017 Retrospective (ballpoint collection)
- Staying on track with ICAD (personal reflection 2016)
- ICAD Week 8 (self portraits in 2017)
- ICAD Week 7 (2017)
- ICAD Week 1 (2017)
- Gathering Data (a retrospective look at 2016)
- Whitewashed Index Card (this approach in 2016 was divergent… and yet I loved it)
- When to Stop (thoughts on a 2016 card that I should have left alone!)
- Magenta (thoughts on process, 2016)
- Little Decisions (process, 2016)