January kept me busy with an exceptional creative challenge. It was the #iartdaily challenge. Brought to us by icreatedaily.com, more on them in a bit.
The jist of the challenge was to get your creativity bone jumpstarted for the new year. Whether you are a writer, photographer or fine artist and all other makers and visionaries in-between, we were all invited to take the daily prompt and run with the spark of our individual creativeness.
I have done several challenges over the past few years. What I love about any challenge is using a small amount of time to create something special. Not every piece is memorable, but it is a great way to take a few tools and experiment in new ways over the course of 30/31 days. I try to mix digital and painted pieces in my challenges, but that wasn’t really a possibility during the #iartdaily challenge. Although, I did have the opportunity to pull some of my older paintings and photography from my archives.. These pieces seem to resonate with some of the prompts so I used them. Looking back, I ended up honing my digital art and illustration skills.
This is what I love about a challenge, seeing what develops over the course of 30 days. I definitely do not know where the journey is taking me but I enjoy the inspiration along the way.
Some of the prompts brought great blog posts to mind as I created the images. Unfortunately there just wasn’t enough time for me to create and blog all on the same day. Truth be told, I don’t really fancy myself a writer, so it takes me hours to get my thoughts down and edit and post. And of course I find a glaring typo after I post. Ah well- a work in progress.
So, the challenge was complete and I decided to stay away from any challenges in February . Time to catch up with “life” and getting things in line for March. I am planning on a writing challenge with icreatedaily.com. As I said I’m not much of a writer, but I am feeling the call to tell a few stories and I need some place to start this journey- and so it goes.
During the challenge I was getting ads on social media for book creation websites that could take your instagram uploads and turn them into a book. I used chatbooks.com, but mixbooks.com was theater site that kept popping up. Blurb and Lulu are 2 other self publishing sites that offer similar self publishing options. Warning- these books tend to be pricey, but are worth it if you are looking for an all in one keepsake.
The book shown was a belated Birthday gift to myself. I haven’t done any portfolio update in a long time, so this was an opportunity to have a “hands-on” project to show and tell.
One final note the #iartdaily challenge is from the ladies at www.icreatedaily.com, LeAura and Devani Alderson. The challenge was hosted on Facebook and the prompts appeared daily. All of the prompts appear on the icreatedaily.com site. These ladies did an amazing job, curating and wrangling the community at large. A huge thank you and pat on the back. During the challenge I didn’t have much time to poke around the website, but it is on my to-do list for the month of February.
See You all soon- sheree
