Blinded by the Light

"Color is to the eye what music is to the ear."   
 Louis Comfort Tiffany

The journal prompt for the Facebook journaling group I belong to was very interesting this past week. Adopt an artist.... not literally of course, and recreate a piece of their work. After giving this some thought, it suddenly came to me like an epiphany. Tiffany (hey, that rhymes!)... Louis Comfort Tiffany... stained glass artist extraordinaire. I used to create stained glass art myself (many years ago in another lifetime), so he would be the perfect choice. 

Before I show my process, here is a picture of the final piece, along with a quote from Tiffany.

First I pulled out a book I have about the artist, and found a picture of a lamp that had pieces big enough to.... do what, you ask? Well, tangle them, of course! This is the photo of the lamp from the book.

I traced the lamp onto a piece of tracing paper and then rubbed pencil all over the back of it, laid it on my journal page, and traced over all the lines with a ball point pen. This transferred all the lines onto the journal page. Here's the beautiful piece of tracing paper.

Once all the lines were on the journal page, I traced over them (again) with black pen. I chose to use the fat end of my Identi-pen to make thicker lines that look like the lead in stained glass. Here's how it looked at this point.

See those faint lines at the top of the lamp that I did not trace over in black? Those gave me the general idea of what the lights looked like in the lamp (refer back to the above picture from the book to see what I mean.) That was the scary part... figuring out how I was going to draw in those lights... not as easy as the rest of the lamp. So I just put that out of my mind temporarily, and went on to color the pieces of glass, trying to match my colors to the original as best as possible. Using alcohol markers, along with an alcohol blender pen, I attempted to make the pieces look mottled like the glass. I was quite happy with the way that worked out!

But then I had to figure out how to do those lights at the top. Knowing that if I tried to recreate that by hand I would mess up my whole project, I decided to make a copy of the lamp from the book, cut out the top portion, and glue it onto my lamp in the journal. Yay! It actually worked. Except that my lamp looks a little warped because it wasn't an exact match.

Finally the tangling began. I chose tangles that were open and airy as opposed to ones that had black spaces in them. I wanted to allow all the light to shine through! And I only tangled the flowery sections, not the leaves, as I was afraid some of the greens were too dark to really allow the tangles to pop out. Here's the final piece, except for the quote that I added (see the first photo above.)

All in all, I was pretty happy with the way this turned out. If only I had known about Zentangle all those years ago, I could have actually tangled on the glass pieces I made. Now that I think about it, I still have just a few of those stained glass  pieces around... I may have to pull them out and give it a try.