Only three days to go and the sixty-one day long index card a day challenge will be over! It has been such a blast – honestly, I had no idea what an impact these wee pieces of card would have on me.

I haven’t been able to make a card every day, but perhaps every second day on average, and since I began to make the #colourportraits, usually more than one at a time.

This means that I have the same amount as if I’d made one a day – that’s quite a body of work, in miniature!

I’ll wait until the challenge is over to show off all of the cards – and reveal my plans for them (think trades and give-aways – and newsletter subscribers will have first dibs!)

I’ve also been working on developing the #colourportraits into a couple of very unique product offerings – you’ll get a sneak peek of those this Wednesday on the #peakoftheweek blog post.

Today, though, it’s creative practice Monday, and I thought you might like to take a closer peek into how I create the mini #colourportraits for #icad.

(How do you feel about all the hashtags? I’m not a fan of text language abbreviations, but if I could communicate in hashtags and emoticons, I most probably would!)

Creating a mini colour portrait with Pentel oil pastels. These are gorgeously blendable oil pastels available on Amazon at a great price (Pentel Oil Pastels – Set 50) – and a great colour selection. A great brand to get started with, I’d say:

This next one sees me use the first oil pastels I ever bought – really inexpensive KFONG brand from the discount book store The Works. They’re quite waxy, much less blendable than the Pentel brand, but I rather like the more sketchy approach the wax texture necessitates :

The Sennelier oil pastels are somewhat more expensive and so I bought a starter selection to see how much I like them (Sennelier Oil Pastels 12 Assorted Colours.) I’ve mentioned before that I like their pigment-rich creaminess, but the selection doesn’t include my favourite colours to use, so I feel a bit limited by them.

I hope you enjoyed those? I love making these speedy videos – so much easier than having to provide a voice over and sound like I know what I’m talking about 😉

p.s. don’t forget to visit Tammy’s website for all things #icad – and a new challeng for August!