Playing with String...and P's

Right now, I'm de-numbing from a visit to the dentist. Went in for a routine cleaning...they found a cavity...someone happened to cancel...they took care of the cavity then and there. So I'm sipping some chicken broth, watching some Netflix, and posting on my blog. And maybe not my most sparkling prose.

A couple of fun challenges this week.
Suzy Mosh  New to Me Challenge is all about P tangles, and I found a couple of bran-new ones. Plates by Zoe Brener, which I found on tanglepatterns.com and pixiose which came through on my email through Adele's String Thing Challenge . 

I also saw pixioze on pinterest, I think. Very cool tangle. It is my go to relax pattern right now.

Anyway, the tile I created for SuzyMosh:

In the Garden

I made my own random string, and started with LoLo up on the center left. Aura'ed it. Then plates along the left. I really like the way Linda Farmer displays plates on her sample at tanglepatterns, so that's the version that I did. Pixioze piled up in the center, and I packed some tipple around it. Then sez on the right. In the background, I did those lines and shiny black dots, and maybe I've created a tangle? I'd call it Tux.

In all, it reminds me of a garden, with a trellis and climbing rose, flowering shrubs, pebble paths.

For It's a String Thing this week, a fun string, and some terrific patterns.

Looks like the garden path is twisting along into another realm.

Zenith came to my email from zentangle.com, and I spent some time practicing it even before checking It's a String thing. It is a wonderful border pattern, and I'd like to draw it big, with plenty of shading. More Pixioze, and Ann is completely new to me.

These tiles were lots of fun to do. Now to drowse and doodle and watch a Leverage marathon.

Undulating on the Curve; Playing with The Crescent Moon

The Tangleation Vocation presented at The Tangle Corner by Daniel this time is to go crazy with Crescent Moon. Confession: crescent moon was one of my first patterns to play around with...like, the first one where I really let go and did whatever the heck I wanted. My first venture into "What is the art DOING?" and I made a piece that I really liked, so I present it here, although it was created about a year ago.

It reminds me of a Carnival!

This was so much fun to do and though my lines weren't as sure in those days, I still really like this one.


The challenge over at the Diva's Place comes from guest CZT Sharla Hicks, and she considers S and C curves to be most delicious, particularly the undulations involved. WHAT FUN! Most of my favorite tangles are curved like that, and I was delighted to have this challenge.What shall I do? Which pattern should I choose! so excited!...and then I got utterly stumped. A dry spell washed over me, and I had not an iota of creativity anywhere in me.

I tried putting a string down...FLOP. Tried free forming...KERPLOP. Nothing but NOTHING was working. No matter what pattern I thought of playing with, I couldn't make anything that was pretty to  look at. Even those lovely S's and C's let me down.

Well, I did complete a couple of pieces that feature that curvy undulation heavily...such as this one:

the photo is blurry. Sorry.

Leaflet in several incarnations, and there is Neil Burley's pineapple there in the center right, and what IS that pattern called, with the C's switching back and forth....I even included a wavy, undulating passel of ribbony stuff there on the bottom right corner.

I thought this might do, but then I decided to make something with a new pattern. 
New to me, anyway,











So, at the back of my current sketchbook is a pattern I tried out for something that Suzy Mosh recently gave us, to use A tangles...and Ace by Sandy Hunter was one that I tried out.

It starts with an S curve, and then a C curves right into the hollows made by the S. Lots of fun! so I played with it a while.

something aura'ed

 I did a lot of singles, and then had the idea of stringing them together, as in a border. And that's what I started with for the piece I finally ended up making.

Everything on here is Ace, except the niuroda up in the right corner, and it has Ace in the center, and also some Printemps piled up around the bottom.

Now, the thing with Ace is, it starts on an S curve, and you make the C curve come up from the "outer" edge of both curves in the S. In other words, a proper Ace is two directional. You can see it in the little individual Aces I made.

BUT, I started with that frond of Aces, all plant looking on the left margin...and they all go the same direction. The same with the rays...they are uni-directional.

It wasn't until I started filling in with individual Aces, that I realized...the long frondy connected Aces all go the same direction! But they look pretty, don't they?


Well, at any rate, I certainly did play around with this. As I put the lighter, smaller samples of Ace in there, it began feeling like and underwater scene, with bubbles and seaweed and such. I used sepia micron 01 pen, and shaded with prismacolor Tuscan Red and Dark Brown.

So, that completes my challenges for this week. I don't know what this dry spell is all about, but I hope it's over soon. 

Kozy and U tangles and Jane Monk Patterns

This week is packed with  new stuff. I haven't ever done anything with ANY of the tangles I used for these pieces.

Over at Joey's Place, we are up to the letter K in our alphabet wanderings. Kozy!

And SuzyMosh has us playing with new to us U patterns, plus the tangles of Jane Monk, who has lots of fun patterns to play with.

So I'll begin with my piece for the Suzy challenge.

for this one I used a micron 1 pen

I started with Daniel's Undu, a newly published pattern at tanglepatterns.com. There are also two patterns by Jane Monk: strata and connector, which you can see in the upper right and also some strata nestled in the oxbow curve of my undu near the bottom center. Then, up & down from tanglepatterns. I played with that one quite a bit, and enjoyed how it seems to alternate between lozenge, diamond, circle...except where I put it in that curved border on the right, and did some little embellishments in the junctions.

Shading and some glints here and there. It turned out okay. Undu is pretty cool with the shading, and relaxing to draw, and I want to play with up & down a lot more.







Over at Joey's, we're playing with Kozy.

 I didn't know where to start, not wanting to take up a full page in a sketchbook. But as I riffled through my papers and art supplies, brown struck me as a good color for this sort of organic, shell shaped tangle.

seashells? Or chocolates?

There was a brown card stock tile, and I chose my sepia micron 01 for the Kozy. Shading with dark brown prismacolor pencil, and highlights with rose pink prisma. There are some spirals and I outlined the part that got heart shaped, in brown sparkle gel pen.
It's very glittery in real life. I pinned it to my cubicle wall.

Joey's Jemz Challenge

Joey's alphabet challenge is up to the letter J, and she gives us Jemz to monotangle.

This one is a lot more fun outside the grid, but it has plenty of potential on a regular grid, or a curvy one. It would be a really good pattern on a sphere or other three dimensional shape.

 As I played with Jemz, no matter what I did, I couldn't get the sort of "gem" shape I see in the sample on tanglepatterns.com...but, breaking it out of the grid and making a solitaire of it did go all gem like.

I shaded with True Blue by prismacolor, and some flecks of process red, violet, sunburst yellow, and lime green in the solitaire...because really, if you put a diamond under bright light it has such amazing glints and sparkle. This is a tangle I'm gonna play with some more, for sure.

Suzy and Daniel challenges

Today I offer a double entry, one for SuzyMosh and one for Daniel at The Tangle Corner.

Daniel gave us the assignment in his Tangleation Vocation, to play with and tangle-ate Shattuck. I had fun with this one, and did a little variety plate on a page in my sketchbook.

The original pattern is on the left, then I put my own crax in there, as the separating lines. The middle has some larger sized elements, and I threw some wavy stuff in there. I think that is the version I want to play with more.

There is a quite large one across the right...a la' Lori Byerly, whose style is admirable and one I want to emulate. Finished up on the bottom right with more crax, this time crossing them, and filling with shattuck. Fun challenge, Daniel!


SuzyMosh challenges us with A patterns, and because we've had A before, we have a guest CZT that is Karry Huen. Karry has some of my very favorite patterns, such as summer sitter, which I have played with a lot; sand swirl that shows up in lots of artworks; landgirlz which I enjoyed so much in a L challenge and her newest delight is Frost Flower. FUN!

The A pattern I decided on was Aztec by Neil Burley which you see in the left middle and lower right. It's kind of a square, stacky thing. Very cool looking. For the patterns by Karry, I put sand swirl in to balance the square Aztec, and then decided to throw summer sitter in, which I did all wrong but didn't realize until I'd got them almost all done. Summer sitter is really an elegant pattern, a little bit like Mi2 but based on lozenges in an X where Mi2 has more an inverted V shape. I guess.
This tile was pre-colored by me with Derwent water color pencils and water. This did clog up my micron forest green .05 pen a little bit, and if you could turn over the tile, you'd see where I had to scribble a bit to get the ink flowing again.

Oh, I am disappointed in that Summer Sitter. The colors of the tile are nice, and that sand swirl is yummy.

Zendala Challenge

This week at The Diva's Page the challenge presented by guest CZT Erin Olson, is to create a zendala using her template. Erin posts a regular zendala challenge that a lot of people participate in, but I never have, though I've played with mandalas a little bit. This project got me hungering for more.

The mandala template is linked, but I couldn't get it to print up at work, so I just decided to make it. I have a large sketchbook and that's where I put it. Thanks to a mandala project 
that I tackled a little while ago, I already knew how to draw a circle with a compass, and how to mark six points along its circumference. After dividing the circle into six equal parts, I just kept the zendala template in front of me and pretty much copied it.

this is the penciled mandala

these are the tools and the book

The pencil doesn't show up very well, but that is the mandala, penciled into my large sketchbook.






Now, lately I've been playing with spirals. I have a couple of pages with lots of spirals. Kind of seashelly.

 When I did this one, I really liked how cool Tropicana looks along the edge there, so I decided to make a spiral full of Tropicana,





and this is what I ended up with. I fell IN LOVE. It looks like a silver brooch or pendant. 

A pageful of spirals

Here it is on grey tone, with highlights

Gosh, it's cool looking! I added Navaho and zinger in there.











Well, when I saw the zendala template, I knew right away what was going into the circles, and that's where I started. The rest just sort of followed.

The tropicana spirals, with pokeleaf and pokeroot spilling out, then meer and wud in the ovals, and paradox in the center. I was trying for a wooden stem look with the meer and wud. Not sure if I'm all that pleased with those patterns, but shading it helps.

There is a lot of energy and motion in spirals, and the organic pokeleaf and pokeroot, and the abundant little tiny tipples filling the negative spaces in there...well, the zendala looks like it's spinning. I might do it again, since today is my day off and I have a cold AND my Cousin Charlotte is in town...ugh. Not a go out and do things kind of day. More a stay at home and soak my head kind of day.

The Real Negative Space Entry

Well, I ran with the idea of using a tangle as negative space, and this is what I ended up with. I think it works!

Hollibaugh is base and then I filled things up with b'tweed, bunso, niuroda, crescent moon, hypnotic, paradox, nipa, fur balls (the little swirly things) and the one in the small triangle with receding arcs. (Which I can't currently remember but I've used it a lot)

There's some tipple here, too, in a few places.

And shading. When I added the rounded shading to the hollibaugh, it came alive. I'm happy with it.

the J challenge WITH white space

Suzy Mosh's New to Me Challenge this week was to use J tangles and the Diva's guest CZT Sandy Hunter's  challenge was to leave plenty of white space/negative space. Turns out, the tile I made for the Mosh challenge has lots of white space! ha!

A Swirling Breeze

I used a couple of patterns from tanglepatterns.com: Jumu and Jelly Roll. Jumu is easy to add variety to, and the way it's made reminds me of Lolo, which is one of my favorites. At any rate, I kept Jumu simple, and when I'd got done with three strands of it, I knew there needed to be something to balance it, and JellyRoll seemed like a good one. Turns out, I was right. I like how they look together and I like the white space...so I decided to make this one piece for two challenges.

However, I want to show off a mooka piece I played with and liked a LOT, and plan on exploring some more and possibly make it a second entry in the diva challenge.

 Mooka here is just outlined. No crossing lines and no shading. I want to do this again, adding stuff in the negative spaces within the mooka. Maybe it'll look really cool!
(sshhh, I had to pencil in the mooka normally, then outline, then erase)

A Burst of Energy

I also put Fricle in there, a very simple version. But won't it be fun to make mooka BE the negative space. I'll be playing with that idea today and tomorrow.

Inapod Monotangle

Real quick blog post about Joey's challenge this week. in our tour of the alphabet, we are up to I and the tangle for I is Inapod.

This is my entry:

I was playing around with a bijou sized tile and inapod, with a dark brown pen by Recollections (they market to scrapbookers)...well, the pen is thicker than an 01 which is what I use most often, so I decided to just go with that, and made my lines rough and used the same technique for shading.

My camera battery conked out right after taking this pic, so I wasn't able to get a picture of the small one, but for this one I added patches of color, and squiggly spirally things. A few dots here and there. I really like this. Going to play with that rough edged technique some more. Time to break out my 05's :)