On the Fence

"In a complex and troubling world, who wouldn't want to simplify? Everybody does. Everybody wants to simplify and put up a picket fence."  Gary Ross

A while ago I remember seeing pictures of work that some tanglers had completed on paint chips. Yes, you heard right, Zentangle inspired art on those colored cards you get in paint stores when you're trying to decide what color to paint your house. It seemed like a strange choice of surface for tangling. After all, why would you want those color names and numbers that are printed on those paint chips showing in your art work? But even so, I was kind of intrigued by the idea. 

So eventually I stopped by my local Sherwin Williams store and gathered a handful of paint chips in all sorts of colors. Not yet sure what I was going to do with them, I went home and thought and thought and thought. One type of chip I collected was shaped like a rectangle that came to a point on top. It was clearly meant to look like a house, since the paints were from the HGTV home collection. Coincidentally, as I sit watching HGTV (my favorite channel) while writing this, a commercial came on for their home collection of paints! However, when I first looked at the chips, I saw them as posts in a picket fence, not houses. And so, an idea began brewing in my mind. 

Here is my idea brought to life. The paint chips became a picket fence, with plants from the garden peeking out over the top. I placed the four fence posts next to each other and drew a string across all four of them, although I'm not so sure that the continuous string is still noticeable in the end. 

As soon as I began tangling I encountered a problem. Because of the slightly slick surface of the paint chips, the Micron pen smudged right off, even after letting it sit to dry. So I moved on to my Sakura Identi-Pen, which is my go-to pen for pretty much anything I work on that is not paper. The pencil shading was a little challenging also, as I found that it didn't smudge as easily as on the Zentangle tiles or other paper that I typically use.

But in the end, I love it! And as for the names and numbers on the paint chips? After tangling, I can hardly see them at all. Can you?