Here are my next 4 ICAD projects. They actually all sprung from the first one, which was built around the proverb: “Bloom where you are planted”. I was looking through my magazine word and image collection to do a collage, knowing that I’m not great at drawing and wanted flowers (for obvious reasons). I couldn’t find the words, so I got out my Geli-stix pens (with this week’s theme being “ink”). I don’t know why I still have those pens because I’ve never liked them. They only work intermittently, so I have to go over and over the lines and it wasn’t the look I was going for here. Oh well. I tried drawing some flowers on it, but didn’t like those much either. I can’t throw anything away (hence, the pens) so I decided to experiment. I screwed open the pen and used an Xacto knife to cut the cylinder that holds the ink. I tapped, and blew, and flicked the ink all over my little card. It was so fun. So I opened up a couple more pens. Then, I took a couple other cards and blotted up the extra ink, giving me backgrounds for 3 more cards! And these are my final products:
Of course, the last one is the the original card. (Remember, I can’t throw anything away.) I went over the original lettering with a silver and a black sharpie. I guess my little card did bloom, after all.
The best part of the story is that I posted another card on Daisy Yellow’s ICAD Facebook page, saying that I really didn’t like those Geli-stix. Another person in the group suggested that I gift them to her, because she would use them. As I was going through my aforementioned magazine word collection looking for the first quote (that I ended up doing a lot of word-by-word and letter-by-letter) I found the quote from the Bhagavad Gita… a perfect way to use one of my inky backgrounds.
This whole exercise was certainly an “adventure of the mind”. I love how things work out sometimes when I open myself up to whatever the Universe might bring me. THAT’S the source of all creativity, I think.