"Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you." Nathaniel Hawthorne
This week's Diva challenge comes from guest blogger, CZT Sandy Hunter, while the Diva takes some well deserved time off. Sandy's challenge is to "Shift your focus to the negative space, so the white part of your tile is the focus of your tangle." So I chose to use a stencil of a butterfly for my white, or negative, space. I tangled a border around the butterfly and then filled the background with tangles using lines, lines, and more lines. My favorite kind of patterns. I added a couple with curves, but they are still lines. Here is the way it looked before shading.
I used Fassett, Static, Sand Swirl, Printemps,Paradox, and Baton. Very relaxing tangles for me. It was completed on a 6 1/4 inch square piece of Strathmore drawing paper. It comes out looking very white here, but it actually is a pale cream color. Here's how it looked after shading.
I enjoyed the process and like the outcome, so I will call it a success!
"Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you." Nathaniel Hawthorne
I'm back home now after a long vacation in Europe. Did you miss me? More about the vacation in another post soon.
I'm exhausted and still trying to get over jet lag, but thought I would share something since it has been so long. While I was away I fit some tangling time in between all the activities. One of the pieces I worked on was this butterfly template from Ben Kwok. Here's the original black and white shaded version.
As I was working on it I was thinking that I should add color to it once I returned home. So today I pulled it out and did just that. First I erased all the pencil shading (I know....no erasers in Zentangle), because I don't like adding color over shading. I decided to use pan pastels, but very soon after starting, realized it was a bad decision. For one thing, it was hard to get into all the little corners and tight spots with the pan pastel tools. Luckily the pastels are erasable, so when I was finished I went back and erased all the spots where the color had gone out of the design, and believe me, there were lots of spots. Another problem is that the pastels go over the black pen and make it look lighter, not as sharp and clear. At the end I went back with my Micron pen and filled in the black areas again. That helped, but no way did I have the patience to go back over all the lines.
I did not find the coloring part of this project relaxing at all! But if you don't look at it too closely, I guess it looks okay. Still, the black and white is my favorite.
