The Power of Gold

"Make new friends but keep the old. One is silver and the other is gold."  Author unknown.

I'm in the process of publishing an e-book of all new tangles that I have designed, along with some from guest contributors. It has been taking up a LOT of my time, but I'm really enjoying the process. My goal is to have it ready for my Etsy shop sometime next month. With all my time and energy being spent on that, I haven't been doing a lot of tangling just for relaxation. So I stepped away from my pattern sketchbook this morning to simply tangle.

I had been wanting to test out some new "pens" I got recently, so I figured this was my opportunity. I'm talking about the Sakura pen-touch metallic ink markers. I was told that they work great on black tiles/paper, so that's what I wanted to see. The picture below was my first try, on an official Zentangle tile. I used the gold, silver, and copper markers in the extra fine point. While not as fine a point as the Microns I usually use, they were thin enough to draw nice detailed lines. I love how all three colors look on the black. For shading just a touch, I used the zenstone, recently introduced by Zentangle.com, but I wasn't too excited by the way it looked with the metallic markers.

Next I decided to try one more, so I pulled out a black "tag" from Ranger. I stuck to just one color on this design - the gold. It has a very rich look on the black. The paper is smoother than the Zentangle tiles, and again the markers worked beautifully. For this one, I used Derwent metallic watercolor pencils (without the water), to do the shading. I think it was a much better match than the zenstone.

 

I also have a couple of the markers in a fine tip, which are great for filling in larger areas, but I didn't use them for anything on these pieces. Although I'm not totally satisfied with either of my designs, my objective was to try out the markers, so that I did, and I'm very happy with the way they look. I will definitely be using them again.

Now back to my sketchbook...