I love a challenge! It always motivates me and pushes me to try new ideas, and create more. One of my favorite online challenges to participate in was the card a week challenge, in which we all made one card a week, and a total of 52 cards a year, which is a full deck.
I enjoyed this challenge a lot, and wanted to write about it, in case anyone else wanted to try!
I bought a simple deck of cards in a local Dollar Tree, and prepped the deck for the upcoming weeks. I painted gesso on all the cards, because they were too slick to work on. Gesso gives the surface more tooth, whitens the existing card design out, and allows me to use any type of color on paint on top.
Once I had my deck gessoed, I was ready to start working! Some weeks, I enjoyed trying new techniques or just creating something random, and others I used to document things I wanted to remember. For example, one day when I started working, I noticed my daughter had been to my table and left a drawing there
So I copied her drawing onto a card. I loved working on this, thinking about my daughter’s drawing, and writing this post three years later, it’s so sweet to see how much she’s grown and how her drawings have changed. I love that I have this sweet memory.
On the back of the card, I wrote a short summary of that week. It’s in Hebrew, and not interesting enough to deserve a translation 🙂
On another week, I was busy sewing stuffies after a few years in which I haven’t even opened my sewing machine, so I made a card about that, including machine stitching on it and all!
Another week, I documented a conversation I had with a sweet friend-
Here are some more cards I made –
Why do I do it?
Because it’s a great way to guarantee some creative me time, but even more importantly, because I love processing my week this way, thinking about everything that’s happened, trying to find what would be worth working on, and then figuring out how to express it on such a small piece of card.
These are some more cards I made that year –
Writing this post reminded me of something different I made years ago with a pack of cards – a personal mini-album that I gave my husband as a gift-
If you’re loving the idea of working on a deck of cards as much as I do, you might enjoy this Pinterest board I curated, with a million or so fantastic cards made by other artists, and if you ever decide to take up that challenge and create 52 cards a year, I’d love it if you shared that with me.
