Index Card A Day (ICAD) - Day 2

Hello everyone! I am back with day 2 of the Index Card A Day (ICAD) challenge, with today's theme being "Fireworks".  If you don't know what the ICAD Challenge is, you can find all the information you need at Daisy Yellow's site, here.

To be honest, I wasn't feeling up to today's challenge, and I'm not very happy with my card.  I didn't have any good, creative thoughts about it, and I didn't come across any good book texts to give me the inspiration I needed.  I know, I could have (and probably should have) just done something off-theme, but, well....I wanted to *try* to keep to Daisy Yellow's themes.  So, anyway, here it is, in all it's glory:



In my defense, I cannot draw.  But practice makes perfect, right?  Haha!  Anyhow...I started off with gessoing my index card (white gesso), and when it was mostly dry, I dropped several different colors of Paper Artsy's Infusions onto the card.  If you don't know, Infusions are a pigment powder with two parts - there is the dye, which has the color, and there are little walnut stain granules, which can either leave a really cool brown stained look to the page or gives the color a vintagey look, depending on how you used it.  Because it's very water reactive, I used clear gesso to spread the colors around. When dry, I sketched the fireworks in pencil, then went over it with a black Sharpie pen.




Just look at that grungy mess!  At this point, I still liked it. From here, I simply used black acrylic paint to paint around my pen lines and viola!  Fireworks!  But...I realized as I was doing this, that I didn't look right.


It was fireworks, but there was no sparkle to them.  No vibrancy.  No problem!  I should have known better to use the Infusions - I love them so much, but they are not what you call "vibrant."  So I got out my Brushos (another kind of pigment powder) and some iridescent medium (which makes your paints or inks iridescent.)  The one thing with Brushos is that they go EVERYWHERE if you are not careful with them!  The powder is very fine, and I have been known to have, shall we say, interesting colors show up on my Kleenex after use them.

You can see the before and after here:



You can't see the iridescence, you can hopefully see that the colors are more in-your-face now.



I am not sure that I am totally done with this...I may add stitching with some gold thread or something.



Thanks for stopping by!  What do you think - are you joining in the ICAD fun?  What are your challenges?


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