Trippin on Tripoli

This week we are challenged by Laura Harms to create something using Tripoli. Oh! I had a hard time with this one. I love the pattern, truly, but for some reason I couldn't get my Tripoli mojo on.

There are several other projects I worked on, that also fell flat. Remember my minimalist crescent and stars from last week? Well, I tried a bunch of ways to do that one the opposite way, with tangles all around the moon and stars, leaving them white...and here are my efforts:

First attempt. I wanted to surround the shapes with dense swirly tangles.
Not too impressed.

Then this one, where I tried for lots of swirly stuff, more flow. The sort of flowy ripply stuff in the center was the best part of this one, but then I had to go put the lumpy curvy stuff on the edge.


so I started again....

so this one has the same ripples in the center, and I colored them in to make them more substantial, THEN packed the space around it all with denser, grid oriented tangles. You can see some Tripoli in there but ultimately I don't think this works, either. Maybe I'll figure something out...a little bit of research on negative space art.












Anyway, I also put in some practice on Tripoli, trying to put it in a piece that I liked. Ultimately, I traced a tile in my sketchbook and put a string in it...

 




it came out okay. Shading it made a huge difference.

I followed through on the hexagon shape with Barney in the bottom right, and then a take on Static in the upper right. Some Sanibelle on the bottom to relieve all the lines and angles. At the very end I carried the Sanibelle to the edge, and the lines of the auras.

It sort of reminds me of I dunno...Stonehenge. Or ruins of an alien metropolis?

Isn't Barney fun? an old fave.

and then, because I REALLY wanted some curvy stuff so...

Got the idea for this from Helen Williams and just ran with it this afternoon.