"The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls."
Pablo Picasso
I've been working on a few more of my Zenduo pieces and have three to share with you today. If you missed my post about my challenge to myself, you can read it here to understand what I'm talking about.
My third Zenduo incorporates the tangle patterns Amalea by Chrissie Frampton and Angel Fish by Marizaan. I chose to do this one on gray-toned paper by Strathmore.
It looked kind of unfinished, but not after adding some graphite shading along with white pastel pencil and gelly roll highlighting. I love the way this glows.
My next two patterns are Ansu from Lori Manoogian and Antidots from Anita Roby-Lavery. They are similar patterns so they were easy to combine. A little blackening and a little graying the background with pencil and voila!
The last one for today was done on one of my colored tiles. Sorry, but I don't have a picture of the tile before the tangling. The two patterns here are Aquafleur from Rick and Maria, and Arc Flower by JJ LaBarbera.
They were all fun pieces to create and I'm pretty happy with the way they turned out. I'm a little more worried about the next combination I have to do, but you'll have to come back for that another time.
"Flowers are like friends; they bring color to your world." Unknown
I decided it was time again to combine my two favorite things to do, Zentangle and photography. I've blogged about this before, once in 2016, which you can see here, and once in 2015, which you can see here. I again chose a photo of flowers to tangle since that's one of my favorite subjects for photography.
Here is the photo before any tangling.
I printed the photo on mixed media paper so that I could tangle using my Microns. In the past I've printed them on glossy photo paper which meant that I had to tangle using a Microperm pen because of the slick surface. Not my favorite surface to tangle on.
First I tangled the petals of the two flowers using Angel Fish on one and Maryhill on the other. For the bottom layer of petals I tangled Dyon.
Then I used a gray pen to add some Printemps to the Dyon.
I wanted to add color and shading using some other medium besides pastel pencils which is my usual go to method. Watercolor pencils is what I decided on. I could have used a water brush to blend, but I never feel like I have the control I'd like with a water brush. So I tried a Copic colorless blender pen. I didn't really think it was going to work since Copics are alcohol based, but to my surprise it worked great. With the pointed tip of the blender pen I could control it easily and get into tight spaces.
After adding color, a few shades of pinks and purples on the upper petals, I decided to use some green on the bottom petals to transform them into leaves instead of petals. Some graphite shading was also added to those leaves. And some white gelly roll pen accents in the centers of the flowers.
As one last finishing touch, I added some white pastel pencil (couldn't resist!) highlights on the leaves... can you see the difference?
It was a fun little project. Using photos to tangle is an easy way to have instant color and a ready made string.
