Here Comes the Sun

"It is the artist's business to create sunshine when the sun fails." 
Romain Rolland

I've been pretty busy for the last week preparing for some new classes I have coming up soon. So I was happy to take a break from all the planning to work on the monotangle challenge. Especially since the tangle for this week is Hollibaugh, which is one of my favorites. But I wanted to do something different than a regular Zentangle tile. I thought of creating a black tile, but one of the classes I'm preparing for is working on black, so quite honestly I'm a little tired of black tiles right now. 

Then I thought of a round Zendala tile, but that seemed a little too ordinary also. Keeping the circular idea in mind, I settled on using a stencil of a sun. I knew I was going to add some color, but would I color the sun itself, or the negative space around the sun? Actually that wasn't such a hard decision - it seemed pretty obvious that the sun should be yellow. 

My pan pastels were calling out to me. For those of you who have not used them, they are creamy, smooth pastels that are applied with sponges and leave virtually no pastel dust behind. They blend together easily and beautifully.

Here's my completed monotangle.

The sun is about 6 1/2 inches in diameter, and was completed on 90 lb. watercolor paper. Fairly simple. I varied the width of some of the hollibaugh "bars" and turned some and bent some. But overall it is pretty straightforward. Sometimes less is more. A couple of yellow pastel shades were blended together with a drop of orange for the body of the sun, and I mixed some orange and red for the "rays". Unfortunately, I don't think the variations in the blended colors show up as well as they should in this picture. 

This was a fun break, but now back to more class preparations. Thanks for stopping by, and until next time, let the sunshine in. 

**Addendum - I realized after posting this last night, that I should have gone back in to add more shading to the Hollibaugh lines where they went under and over. Oops! So I've added that shading using the pan pastels again, and here's the updated picture. I think it has some added dimension now.