Playing with index cards

No expectations. Just doodles

March creative challenge entry 3 of 31

Hello, Lovers of Fun & Whimsy!

In March, I’m sharing some form of creativity with you each day. Today, instead of an essay or comics, I’m sharing some index cards.

I love index cards and always keep stacks of them around. They are great for taking notes with when working on books or essays, although I rarely use them for that. My favorite thing to do with index cards is to doodle on them with my watercolor brush pens.

I pull out a card, select a pen or two, and start drawing lines and swirls. There is no goal or plan. I just make marks on the paper.

Each card is a surprise. I find that I like some of these better than others. But it doesn’t matter. I’m not trying to make anything in particular. I just want to make marks. I love the feeling and the sound of moving the brush pen across the paper and seeing what the pens leave behind, filling up all of the white space.

Six years ago, I started marking up index cards as a daily meditative creative practice. I was brand new to visual art, and I found that making these cards helped me improve my line control. It also chilled me out and allowed me to get to sleep afterwards.

I haven’t made cards in this way in a long time. But it was fun to get the pens and index cards out again and feel the release of making something for no reason with no expectation.

Because of the way my brain works, I often see stories in these random lines and shapes. This one looks to me like a battle between radioactive cloud armies.

When I first started with these cards, the stories that popped out became haiku, and the cards became the basis for my first attempts at something like a haiku comic. I still have stacks and stacks of these cards from years ago.

Since those first index card doodles, I’ve discovered other creative uses for these cards. I will show you one of my other favorite ways to use these index card doodles tomorrow.

U/ntil then, here are two pages from an old zine with some haiku comics from index cards that were part of my 2021 zine, I Stare at the Sea (coming back to the Weirdo Poetry Shop later this month!).

Be the weird you want to see in the world!

Cheers,