Daisy Yellow № 127
Measuring giraffes with index cards
Hi everyone, it’s Tammy, welcome to issue № 127. Thank you for being a subscriber. Daisy Yellow is a long-running project started 18 years ago at the beginning of my art journey as a place to share what I’m making & write about creativity.
“When you are completely caught up in something, you become oblivious to things around you, or to the passage of time. It is this absorption in what you are doing that frees your unconscious and releases your creative imagination.”
Rollo May
In this issue, measuring giraffes with index cards plus creative assignment № 13. For paid subs (upgrade to paid by hitting the button below), we’re wrapping up Creative Gazette and starting a new series called Curious Tangents.
ICAD Rev № 16 Starts June 01
We started a creative journey together in a galaxy far away. Working on the simple substrate known as the index card, we learned that a small project adds up, stacks up, multiplies, compounds, and morphs into more than the sum of the individual parts.
What year did you first do the challenge? We have a surprising number of LONG-TIME challengers! To give you a frame of reference, there have been 946 days of ICAD from 2011-2025.
You could measure a stack of ICADs in Smoots1 but also…
① One 61-day challenge is 16.7% of a calendar year.
② Fifteen ICAD challenges = 2.6 years of daily art.
③ End-to-end, the cards would span 1.3 US football fields 🦒 or the height of 24 giraffes.
④ A video of 946 cards, at 2 seconds per card, would be 32 minutes. Per Gemini, this equals one episode of Only Murders in the Building. 📺🕵🏻♀️ Is this just a coincidence?
3x5” index card, a zillion different mediums, 2025
Get set for a 🌈📇 reboot to refresh, renew, re-energize & spice up your life! 2026 marks the 16th iteration of the 61 day Daisy Yellow Index-Card-a-Day Challenge. And there’s a certain symmetry to that!
💁🏻♀️ Please take a moment to read the introduction to this year’s challenge & learn how the challenge works at ICAD Rev № 16 Starts June 01. Historically about half of our creatives use the prompts and I’ll be sharing the prompts a bit differently so I want you to know what to expect.
Why index cards? This is about intentionally stepping back and simplifying. About creating on a small, simple, analog, paper card. It might be counter-intuitive but working on this un-precious base expands rather than limits creativity.
ICAD #91, collage on 3x5” index card, 2025
If you do choose to work with the prompts, I’ll volley this idea ➜ think of this as a creative workout 🏋🏻♀️ ➜ brainstorm a few ideas ➜ look up the prompt in a thesaurus, dictionary & wikipedia (rather than querying an LLM) ➜ find connotations & connections ➜ use your ingenuity ➜ make something ➜ simple is 100% OK.
If you’d like to create on the most fantastical of substrates, get started at 50 things to create on an index card or peruse my art-filled downloadable digital zines including 52 Ideas for Index Card Art. To get a feel for what different mediums work on index cards, see Comparing Mediums. Then it is time to gather your materials!
“Writing isn’t just the production of sentences – it’s the training of endurance by way of sustained attention. It’s a way of learning what one thinks by attempting to say it. An LLM can reproduce the appearance of that activity, but it can’t replace it, because the value lies not only in the object produced but in the transformation that occurs during its making.”
Micah Nathan (MIT fiction writing professor)
Creative Assignment2 № 13:
Write about the life of your favorite blue jeans. Maybe a pair you had long ago. Where did you originally get them? What is/was their best feature? What did you keep in the tiny coin/watch pocket? Have they been torn and mended? Find or paint a color swatch in the hue or color of the jeans or the darkest indigo blue. Would you describe this color as grey, blue, purple, or indigo?
At Daisy Yellow
Grids invite creativity and grids as a set of small projects, canvases & experiments
Daisy Yellow Zine № 20: Index Card Art Love Special Edition
Do the calm+journal project
Choosing Pens for Drawing, Doodling & Sketching
ICAD Rev № 16 Starts June 01
🪩 Your contributions help keep Daisy Yellow going. Tips are welcome!!! ⤵️ Or upgrade your Substack subscription to paid and get extra goodies like the Creative Gazette!
Sending hugs out to you over the invisible internet airwaves 🌀📻 because these are difficult times and nothing makes sense. I will continue to share words & art in the hopes of brightening your day. ❌⭕️❌⭕️
Cheers,
Tammy
You can use smoots as a unit of measurement in Google Earth (⤵️ distance from home to PSU). Per wikipedia, one smoot is equal to the height of MIT student Oliver Smoot who was used to measure the Harvard Bridge.
A Creative Assignment is a simple prompt to spark ideas. Do any or all, in any order.
Tammy, I'm excited ICAD is back again, I can't believe it's 16 years. But then my son was only small when we first joined in and now he's 21 and moving overseas! I'm sending him with a pack of cards and we're going to share our daily card with each other. This is a challenge that has meant a lot to us both over the years, thank you so much for continuing this fabulous tradition.
Our creative community has been so fortunate to have your amazing ideas as inspiration throughout the years of this incredible challenge Tammy🫶