Snowflakes Keep Falling on my Head

"Being unique is better than being perfect."    Unknown

Last week there was a new prompt for the Zentangle art journaling Facebook group I belong to. It was all about cutting a snowflake from paper using your initials as the pattern. The theme for the week was uniqueness....just like each snowflake is unique, so is each person.

I was a little intimidated by the snowflake directions, but I gave it a go.  My first problem was that when I folded my paper, it didn't work out the way it was supposed to. The directions weren't hard to follow, but something just wasn't lining up properly. So I did the best I could, and continued. Here is the snowflake that I ended up with, using my initials, CEM. See that point at the top? Well, there should have been three of those, but the other two got cut short, I can only assume because the folds hadn't lined up properly. I figured I could tweak that when I traced the snowflake and add the other two back in. But something else kept nagging me...why does my snowflake look like it has three points instead of six? Since the theme is about being unique I decided to just go with it...mine would certainly be unique!

The center part was also not very symmetrical, so I tweaked that some after tracing the snowflake into my journal. This was going to have to be spread over two pages since my journal wasn't big enough, so the line you may notice down the middle in the photos is the center of the journal pages. Once the tracing and tweaking were done, I tangled.

As I was tangling I realized that I should have done the background before tracing the snowflake on the pages, but too late for that now! I'd have to figure out how to liven up the pages in some other way. I chose to add color to the open spaces of the snowflake using my Tombow markers - two shades of green and two of blue. I was pretty happy with the way that came out (i.e. I did not mess up after all the time spent tangling!), so things were beginning to look up.

Next I chose a quote about being unique and lettered that with an 08 Micron. Then I added some color to the letters with two of the Tombows I had used before. Of course I tested the lettering on scrap paper first, as well as the color outlining. I penciled the letters on the pages before adding the ink...no room to mess up now! But I felt like the pages needed something more to finish them off. Using a Dylusions stencil and Ranger distress ink pads, I added blue and green circles/dots around the edges. 

One last finishing touch was adding some sparkle to imitate the frosty look of a snowflake. For this I used my clear Wink of Stella glitter brush over the colored sections.  I took a close up picture so you could see the shimmer better.

All in all, I must say that I'm pleased with the look of my very unique snowflake. What I anticipated being a disaster didn't turn out so bad after all.