The Index-Card-a-Day challenge and World Watercolor Month both ended July 31. Here are my last five cards for the challenges.

I haven’t done a lot of Zentangle recently, and I really miss it, so for Day 57 I painted a background and drew a mandala on it, inspired by this video. Patterns used are thumbprint, ko’oke’o, shattuck, onamato, golven (variation), and birds on a wire. This turned out to be my favorite this week:

I watched several watercolor tutorials this week, including one on how to paint flowers, the prompt for World Watercolor Month, Day 28, which inspired this card for Day 58:

Day 59. The World Watercolor Month prompt for Day 29 was Glorious Green, which made me think of leaves:

For Day 60 I wanted to paint a still life of a bowl of fruit. I looked online for a reference photo, but I got distracted by the picture of the bowl of cereal, so I painted that instead (click on the smaller photos to enlarge):

Day 61’s painting was going to be something else, but it wasn’t turning out the way I’d hoped, so I decided to use it as a background and painted a treble clef over it, loosely relating to the prompt of the day, symphony:

This year I made 53 small artworks in 61 days. That’s my personal best for the three years I’ve participated in the challenges. Not all of the cards are that great, but that’s to be expected. We learn more from our mistakes than we do from our successes. I experimented with some new (for me) techniques, so I am pleased.