Diva Circles

"Life is a circle. The end of one journey is the beginning of the next."     
Joseph M. Marshall

Just stopping by with a quick post. I saw that the Diva's challenge for this week is to make a string out of circles and tangle it. Well, it so happens that last week I did just that, so I decided to post it now. 

I've been doing a lot with alcohol inks lately, and that's where the vibrant colors in this piece come from. Alcohol inks were spread all around on a piece of Yupo to make the background, and then alcohol was dropped in random places to form all the circles. 

Using a Microperm pen, I tangled the circles and added some white highlights. First I used my Uniball Signo white pen to do the highlights, but after a short time they faded  and were not very bright. So I tried my white Souffle pen and went over the same spots. This time they stayed bright and are puffed up a little from the paper, hence the name Souffle.

Patterns used: Munchin tangleation, Kuke, Marasu, and Purk

I had a lot of fun making this one. Hope you like it!

Drip, Drop

"Color! What a deep and mysterious language, the language of dreams."   Paul Gauguin

The Diva's challenge this week is to use color. Looking back, I realized that most of my recent blogs  have been about using color in some form. So here is another one.

Almost exactly a year ago I wrote a blog about using alcohol inks on glossy paper as a background for tangling. You can see that post here. It's interesting to see how much my tangling style has changed and evolved since then. During the last year I have used my alcohol inks to make lots of colored tiles on watercolor paper, but have not used them again on glossy paper. I've been inspired by seeing other people post about using the inks, so I decided it was time to play with them again. Actually, a while ago I bought Yupo paper (you can read about it by clicking on the link), and a new book about creating with alcohol inks, Pigments of Your Imagination. And they've been sitting around waiting for me for some time now. The time finally came last week.

I cut up the Yupo into pieces about 3 1/2 x 5 inches, and following the book and other information I've collected, I squirted, and blew, and splattered, and tilted, and pushed, and pulled. It was so much fun to play, not ever really knowing what to expect. I used both Ranger inks and Spectrum Noir inks, along with 91% alcohol. I used straws, and credit cards, and coffee stirrers, and q-tips. The result was many, many, beautiful, bright, inky little pieces of art. Some of them are so pretty on their own that I almost didn't want to tangle on them.

Here's a picture of one of the first ones I used. This was created by dropping ink on the paper, letting it spread, dropping more ink, dripping alcohol, and repeating those steps until I was happy with the results. Adding alcohol helps the ink spread, and can also lighten the colors. This is the before...

And this is the after (using Sakura Microperm pens)...

I started by tangling the obvious circular shapes, and then filled in behind, leaving a few sections of color untouched. 

The next one is one of my favorite "tiles" that I made. I love the color combination. It was created by laying down lines of ink, then spreading with a straw or coffee stirrer (I don't remember which), and tilting, and spritzing alcohol on it.

I wasn't worried about that green spot that somehow found it's way onto the paper, because I knew that once I tangled it would disappear...

Due to the process of spreading the inks around, it is inevitable that some of the ink seeps to the underside of the paper. Most of the time it just looks like a mess, and I don't really care what the back looks like. But every once in a while the back side turns out to look really nice and artistic, purely by accident. Like on the pink and yellow piece above. Here's what it looked like.

Some of that was from ink seeping under the edges, and the different colors you see were leftover on the craft sheet I was working on. I thought it could look really nice if I tangled on all that white space in between the beautiful inky edges. So that's what I did.

I'm not sure that I really like the combination of tangles that I chose, but did like the effect of tangling down the middle. A big stack of more of these "tiles" awaits my pen, and I'll share some of them another time. If any of you are interested in learning how to use these inks, I would highly recommend the book I linked to above. 

Happy inking and tangling!

Fun With Photos

"Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation."   
Henri Cartier-Bresson

One of my hobbies is photography. I decided to print some of my photos to add tangling and make unique ZIAs (Zentangle inspired art). The first one I chose to do was a photo of the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, Scotland, taken last August when I was visiting my daughter who moved there last year. Here is the photo I took (actually one of thousands).

You will notice that it was a nice sunny day and the sky was very blue. Well, that is not so commonplace over there, where it often seems to be gray and rainy. So I thought I would tangle the sun's rays on the picture and send it to my daughter so she could look at it and brighten her days when it was not so nice outside.

I used the Sakura Microperm pens on these photos, as the regular Microns would smear right off the glossy surface. What I learned after completing that photo is that the 01 pen worked great, smoothly gliding over the surface as I drew lines. But when it came to blackening in those little spaces in the middle (in the tangle Baton), neither the 01 nor the 05 worked so well. I had to touch the pen SO lightly to the paper to get the ink to fill in.

Fast forward a month or so to when I took out the next photo to tangle. The story behind this one was that I had gone out for a day of photography with a friend of mine. On our return trip trouble brewed. There was an accident on the bridge we had gone over, so the bridge was closed and we had to go all the way around and home a different way and over a different bridge. Traffic was just a disaster all over the place, and what should have been a half hour ride home turned into 2 1/2 hours! This VERY slow trip took us across the Ravenel Bridge which connects Charleston to Mt. Pleasant where I live. As we sat in traffic on the bridge, we were in a great position to take pictures of the top of the bridge, which is nearly impossible to get any other way. So, trying to look on the positive side, I pulled out my camera and snapped a few pictures right through the dirty car window. To my surprise I got a very good photo where you can't even tell it was taken through a dirty window. So, now that you know the whole story, here is my original photo.

When I tangled, it came out a little too dark to see when I scanned it, so I tweaked the color in Lightroom so the tangling is more obvious. Unfortunately, since some time had passed since tangling the Royal Mile, I forgot that filling in spaces was difficult, and I ran into the same problem on this one.

And then, just for fun, I decided I would make this one into a black and white image to see how it would look.

The last photo I tangled is my favorite one. I recently bought a new camera (a Panasonic Lumix FZ70 for those of you who care), and on the first day that I had it I went outside on my deck and took some pictures, just to get familiar with the camera. This is a photo of a dying magnolia flower on a shrub we have. I love the way it came out with the water drops. 

I (my husband) lightened the background a little in Photoshop before printing it, to make the tangles stand out better. This time I remembered not to use any tangles that had spaces that needed to be blackened. First I tangled the white border that was on the print I got from CVS, and then brought the pattern into the photo some more on one side. Wasn't sure exactly where to stop, but here it is.

This was fun - something a little different. If you're not into photography yourself but would like to give this a try, a fellow CZT, Sindy Levine, has published a book called "Real Life Strings", which is a book full of her own photos ready for your tangling pleasure. You can see the book here.

Tiptoe Through the Tulips

"You're only here for a short visit. Don't hurry, don't worry. And be sure to smell the flowers along the way."   Walter Hagen

Those of you who have ever cruised know that there is always - at least on all the cruises I've ever taken - an art auction. We usually don't attend them, although one time we did and actually bought a piece of art that now hangs in my study/zentangle room. On my cruise last month, as an incentive to get people to go to the art auction, they were handing out some sort of raffle ticket along with an art print, to everyone as they walked through the ship. We did not go to the auction, but did come home with two of the following pictures of a tulip.

I'd love to give the tulip artist credit; however, I can't read the signature. But you know where my mind went immediately...the tulip was just screaming out to be tangled. I only wish they were handing out a variety of prints on the ship, because I really don't want to tangle two of the same thing. It would have been great to have an extra one had I messed up the first one and wanted to start over, but that didn't happen (yay!). So here's what I got when I put pen to paper.

 

The paper has a glossy surface so I used my Sakura Microperm pen to tangle, as the Micron pens I usually use would just have smeared and made a mess. The variations of color in the tulip form a natural kind of shading, so I didn't do any extra shading after tangling. 

Around the colorful area is a one inch white border which is difficult to see in the above picture (the whole print is nine inches square). I decided to also tangle the border, using the pattern Knot Rickz, a pattern which really looks better with shading. Pencil wouldn't work on the glossy surface, so I tried my alcohol markers. First I tried a Copic marker (on my extra picture), but it seemed to kind of smudge the lines I had drawn. So I tried a Prismacolor brush marker which did the trick. They're both alcohol based markers, so I don't understand why one worked and not the other.

Well, now what do I do with the extra tulip picture? I've decided to give it away to someone else who would like to try tangling it. There will be a slight difference, as I had to cut off the corners on the diagonal (just the white border). I actually might like it better that way and wish I had done that to mine before I tangled. So...if you'd like to tiptoe through the tulips with your pen, leave a comment here. Sorry, but I can only mail it to someone in the U.S. You have until Thursday, October 16 to post a comment. On Friday I will randomly pick one of the comments and post the winner here (please include your name in your comment). So check back at the end of the week to see if you will be receiving a flower in the mail!

Come Fly With Me

"If you want success in life, then just learn how to walk like a turtle instead of flying."  
 Vikrant Parsai

Time sure does fly by when you're not paying attention. It's been nearly three months since I attended Tangle U in Maine. While I was there, I bought 3 luggage tags to tangle from Kip Kozlowski. I hadn't done anything with them, but with two airplane trips coming up between now and the end of the summer, I decided I had better pull them out and get moving on them.

They are made from some sort of white plastic material, so I knew my microns would not work on them. I used Microperm pens, also made by Sakura, but meant to be used on non-porous surfaces. They worked perfectly - the 01 for drawing and the 05 for filling. The Sakura Identi-pen would have worked also, but I like the finer line of the Microperms better. 

Here's the first one I made. I found it easier to make the straighter lines than the curved lines because the pen slipped more as I went around in circular motions.

Here is what I decided to do on the front of the tag.

On the next one I decided to do a monotangle (just one pattern), and I chose 'Nzeppel and added the lines to make them look more like flowers. Normally when I do this, the shading really makes the petals of the flowers look like they curve under, but I couldn't figure out what to use for shading and was afraid I would ruin it if I tried. So, no shading. The red I used here was done with the Identi-pen.

And the front.

For my last tag I decided to stick with the monotangle idea and chose Bunzo. I really like the way it looks, but wasn't sure what to do on the front, so for this one I just left the front white with no tangling.

If you'd like to make some of your own luggage tags, you can contact Kip at kipkoz@sprynet.com for info on ordering the tags.

Now I'm all ready for my trips, the first one coming up in less than 2 weeks. I definitely have one of a kind tags to adorn my luggage with. My fingers are crossed that the tags don't get destroyed first time out, as has happened with new suitcases!