My daughter and I are playing along with a new (to me!) creative challenge at the moment: Index Card a Day. As the name suggests, the premise is to create something (a drawing, doodle, painting, poem, calligraphy, art journaling, collage – anything goes!) on an index card everyday during June and July. ICAD is hosted by the fabulous Tammy from Daisy Yellow Art. There are both weekly and daily prompts, the weekly prompts are broad (encouraging specific techniques or mediums for example) and the daily prompts are more specific but still very open to personal interpretation (cobalt blue, playground, bouquet etc).

Playing along with the prompts is totally optional, so far I have created a grand total of one index card based on the daily prompt! The very first prompt was “Mix Tape”:

As the days have gone on I have surprised myself by choosing to play with colour and pattern more and more rather than working on small scale drawings as I had initially planned. I’m finding that losing myself in drawing abstract patterns at the end of the day is much more relaxing!


I also expected to get frustrated with the poor quality paper of the cards (they are just cheap and cheerful 6×4 record cards) but they haven’t performed as badly as I thought they would and I find that I don’t care at all if the surface gets a bit torn up using layers of colour. It’s all part of the process!





If you’re interested in playing along with ICAD (you can jump in at any time!) head over to Daisy Yellow Art for all the information on the challenge. There is also a kid’s version of ICAD – perfect for those lucky kids who have already finished school for the summer! My daughter and I have been working on our cards together in the evenings as we still have three weeks left of school. Boo.
If you’d like to follow along with my ICAD cards, I’m posting them over on Instagram, on my Pinterest board and in the ICAD Facebook group. Happy ICADing!
*Materials Used:
- Silvine 6×4 plain white index cards – any index or record cards will work (whether they’re coloured, white, ruled, plain or tabbed) I just happened to pick up a pack of these ones! I will be using these until I run out of cards and then I might try something different.
Colour:
- Posca Paint pens – opaque paint pens that I don’t get the chance to use very often in my day-to-day work but that I LOVE to play with! Amazon UK
| Amazon USA
- Koi Brush pens – water-based pens that give a lovely textured colour Amazon UK
| Amazon USA
- Promarker pens – my go-to markers for my design work, great for creating both flat washes of colour and textured / layered effects Amazon UK
| Amazon USA
- Staedtler Triplus fineliners – great for adding tiny bits of detail here and there over other layers of colour Amazon UK
| Amazon USA
Black and white :
- Sakura Gelly Roll medium gel pen (white) Amazon UK
| Amazon – USA
- Uni-ball Signo pen (white) Amazon UK
| Amazon USA
- Pigma Micron fine liners (black) Amazon – UK
| Amazon – USA
- Uni-Pin fineliners (black) Amazon – UK
| Amazon – USA
- Rotring ArtPen (black) Amazon – UK
| Amazon USA
Useful links:
* Please note there are affiliate links in this blog post. If you click through and make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no additional cost to you. Thank you for your support!