Moowa Moves Me and...an Ornament

It's been a little while since I made a blogpost...seems that simply putting things on Pinterest without much discussion is so much quicker. Anyway, I have a few minutes this morning so I thought I'd do a proper blog entry today.

The Diva challenge is about Moowa, a new tangle pattern that resembles mooka on a wave. So much fun! Playing around, I found that I could make a classic look Moowa:

                                          but a "stacked" Moowa is pretty cool too:

the stacked one has some interesting depth that I like a lot. I actually did it on accident by not following the step out...got started and just went for it after a mere glance at the instructions ha!

Moowa play

So, I got started on the challenge, just sort of playing with the shapes and movement of the pattern. When I'd put several motifs on my page, I realized this was turning into a monotangle, and would be my entry.

I took a picture pre-shading, but you can see where I caught myself JUST at the beginning of coloring. After filling up with Moowa, I added tipple and put a border of sand swirl along the one edge, and some tipple/perfs to outline the rest.

And here it is, colored in:

A coworker suggested all the random colors. I had been thinking of keeping all the moowa waves in ocean hues, but I really loved playing with all the colors. Some indigo blended out from the edges, and I used a blue gray on the sand swirl. Left the tipple "bubbles" white and foamy. There is just so much MOTION! I want to play some more!

For Joey's challenge

we are continuing in the "finish my tangle" vein...And this time around, it is a hexagon shape with Japonica running across the center. It was a challenge to really like this one UNTIL I colored and shaded it.

Amaze in the background, and around the border a little twisty thing I invented around Xmas a couple of years ago. I think it looks Christmas Lighty. The ornament itself reminds me of those old fashioned glass ornaments that had metallic colors and interesting shapes in the hand.

and, just one traveling tile this time... I always sit and study the starts I receive...oftentimes they are so perfect as they are, I hesitate to add anything. And that certainly was the case with this start from Jo Flaherty:

Her start is so elegant and simple and I loved it just as it was, so it sat aside for a few weeks before I thought of a way to finish it...

I kept it simple, and followed just exactly where she had started, with some perfs in black and a little bit of Floatfest, and a row of white dots. The edging is one I took straight from one of my favorite movies. I call it Howl's Chain and it comes from the movie "Howl's Moving Castle"...if you ever get a chance, watch it. The detail is superb, and one of those details is the chain that Wizard Howl wears around his neck. You see it peering out from behind his blouse. It is not important to the plot, but the fact that Hiyao Miyasaki added that kind of detail...well, that's what makes him a master.

Halloweenish

So fittingly, Laura Harms's challenge for us this week is to make some Halloween themed art. I found an orange tile, and put some rather creepy stuff on it. Abundies can look like a pumpkin,

then I added leaflet along the bottom, and Ropuz has always reminded me of fungi, growing in the dark, damp, hidden places. Those little "stick out your tongue" bits are called Lumpi,, goofy looking and creepy alien looking...Rain, and lava lamp (?) and some shading along with white gelly...kinda creepy fun, eh?

But I can't leave out one of my favorite pieces I ever made, which was was from last year's Halloween week String Thing challenge. Adele Bruno set us with a Candy Corn shaped string, and gave us Chartz, Cadent, Cracked and Confettus to play with...well I had so much fun with it, coloring it and such, so I include it here. :)

clearly, I had the most fun with chartz eyeballs hahahaha and I didn't put cadent in anywhere...but the colors were fun, and I tucked it away, and when the time came this year I put it on my wall at work and took a picture of it for this challenge.

DuoTangle Flux and NZeppel

This was a fun challenge. I like both of these tangles. Flux is always fun, and N'zeppel is my mac n cheese pattern. I use it in most of my pieces.

And, the challenge came along as I was revving up an interest in gemstones.

So, this is my entry.

My new gray tone sketchbook...mmmm!

The shiny turquoise flux was first. It was so enjoyable, as I was doing it at work, so I'd come and go, and whenever I came back to my desk, I got to see the shiny all over again. The other flux I was trying to get a matte silver patina, not sure how successful that was, but then I comforted myself with shading the Nzeppel...of my most favorite things to do in the world. I used Prismacolor pencils, graphite, and white gelly roller
And the round of nzeppel up in the corner made me think of something...so I did this one:

I haven't done a single smidgen of shading on this one yet, but I thought it was a good choice for the two patterns. It is on a regular tile that I made myself from tiepolo paper.

Lots of fun...and still playing with gem effects.

How to draw Celtic Knots 1 - The Celtic Triskele

Fun with Torn Paper

   

Joey's Challenge...we've been having fun for a few weeks doing challenges modeled after the Traveling Tangles Project on Facebook. Joey "starts" a tile for us, and we finish it. This week, the start is a torn paper tangle.


I didn't know how to do this, and there are no official stepouts as such, so I just went ahead and practiced it a few times until it got looking okay. And then I forgot to take a picture of my "torn paper" before tangling it! ha!


but here is the finished piece   

 
About the time I was thinking I wouldn't participate in the challenge this week, I started fooling around with heartswell/heartstrings by Helen Williams. I love the way she has it drawn on her blog, all sort of swelling and bulging. I did a little sample of it, and thought...wait a minute...what if...


So, going with the idea of hearts welling up out of a constricted flat surface, after I got done doing the heartswell, I thought the "flat" part needed to look like stationery (wall paper? hahahaha) and that's what I did.









Truth be told, my old Rosie cat pretty much did this to a wall near the back door. There was a ding where the knob dented the wall, and she saw it, reached up with a paw/claw to find out what it was, and had a hey day. She really did tear it up, literally. My wall didn't swell up with hearts though.


So, Joey is challenging us with Traveling tangle style, and I am also participating sparsely in the Facebook group.




Here are a few tiles I started and sent to another team member:

To Raye Burnett, who also sent me a couple of starts.

Sandi sent me several in September that I did up, and forgot to post anything about it on FB (in my defense, we were without internet for a while.)

You can see the started tile and two tiles with some color background. I started on the one with the pastels, to send to Raye. The other one has this lovely soft silver and gold sort of glitter background that I can't wait to play with my sparkle gel pens.

Here are some finished tiles:

 



Sandi's first tile started with sixmail.



starting with the flower upper left
finishing with squid, beelight, sanibelle and some tipple.


How to draw a simple Triskele




I learned how to do a Triskele! easy!
along with Tropicana, Onomato, B'tweed, and Pozer.

Challenges and Handcut Tiles and Ensembles

Wow, has this been a creative couple of weeks. A year or more ago, I bought some Tiepolo paper from DaVinci Artist supply. Tiepolo is the paper that Zentangle.com uses for their official tiles, and it is absolutely wonderful to work with. I bought my own large sheets of paper, in order to cut my own tiles. I did many 3.5x3.5 tiles and three opus size pieces at the time. Haven't started anything with the Opus sizes, but I've had lots of fun with the regular tiles.

Due to a snafu in shipping, the first piece was damaged and they sent me a replacement, which I just opened, so I could make some more tiles. And I decided to do an ensemble.

This is the string, before cutting into tiles:

You can see the first cut. The string is there, promise.

I worked on it here and there over a couple of weeks, and these three are the first ones I did. My favorite is the one with hollibaugh and niuroda...

here is the entire thing, completed and in order. You can see where the string was.

Playing with this has been lots of fun. I have it all assembled on my cubicle wall at work...lots to look at. And I have a good supply of tiles again. Maybe I'll start on an Opus soon!

Now, on to some challenges. It is UMT week with the Diva, and this month it is a fascinating tangle called Dreamcatcher...It's very easy to do, and as you work it, voila! a fibonacci spiral develops! Love it.

It's lots of fun, just free hand, but it would be cool done with exact measurements, too.

 

A Ferris Wheel?

 Dreamcatcher, tipple, and mooka. 

And, along with the Diva challenge, I am enjoying Joey's "traveling" tiles every week. This time, with Relly telly one in the corner. 

 

A new tangle for me, and I added another new one, called Interwyned both can be found at patterncollections.com, a terrific website packed with lots of tangles.

similar to Relly telly one, Interwyned has an alternating dot grid to start.

A day without a ninja throwing star is like a day without...sunshine?

This was so enjoyable. I had fun with the alternating dot grid, the flowers, the spirals. The shading!

yup, a week of tangling creativity. 

Some Traveling Tiles

Getting ready to start a new adventure: The Adventure of the Traveling Tiles. It's going to be fun!
So far, I've swapped three tiles,  and I've gotten two fun mail packages, from Pam Signorelli and Michele Wynne. 



From Pam. Look at the black! and the white one with the square string has little birds touching beaks in the corners. That one reminded me right away of Mayan or Russian folk art, and I tried to follow thru with that theme. Not sure how well I did, though I found some pretty cool Mayan designs


at any rate, this is what I made of them:

She started me with garlic in a corner and I added hollibaugh, pokeleaf, and tipples. Finding the way to shade it was fun. I ended up using white charcoal pencil, but leaving the "shaded" areas on hollibaugh and pokeleaf...I think it worked!

This one was lots of fun. It was like drawing my own coloring page and then coloring it in! I added opus in the alternating corners, and then in the center I tried to follow a Mayan pattern I found. I may deconstruct that a bit, because it could be way cool. Anyway, I was looking at a Mayan design when I started it....



Then some Hi-C corners. To color it, I was going with primaries, but then wanted purple in the border.
You can see two pretty gnarly smudges, where I bled on my art hahaha after biting a hangnail right before picking up my pen to start. Argh!

And, Michele Wynne sent me two starts to work with:

 This one to the left has the most interesting texture, and an absolutely luscious color palette. Yum! Starting with a corner full of tripoli...mmm, mmm, good!

I added D-vine, ribbonz, and flord.

With a little bit of tipple, and some flower petal looking things.

And used my gray tombow for shading here and there. 

Which I haven't done that often.

This one has THE most amazing detail, with a delightful shading around the sand swirl, making it all turquoise-y.
Another terrific color palette.

to keep true to Michele's work, I used green and blue micron pen, and highlighted a lot with white charcoal, and used some sand swirl around my Niuroda and printemps. I would LOVE to know how Michele got her shading so smooth in her sand swirls.  I burnished like mad with the burnishing pencil by Prismacolor. A mooka up there in the left was fun. One of the things I enjoyed the most in this was working around the little spots of pure white. I left them untouched in my sandswirls, but in the mooka I went ahead and tangled through it...maybe a bit like a beam of light? Some onomato. Oh...nearly forgot, I made a row of shnek on top of Michele's row of perfs, and tried to do gemstones in the shneck rounds.

And with that, now on to Joey's challenge for this week.

She started us with a corner of one of my VERY favorite grid tangles...buttercup.


  and this is what I made of it:

Shakin the Blossoms Down

I am making some Autumn themed pieces for my cubicle at work, and this is one of them. Buttercup on a yellow tile? Ooh, la, la! Hmm, I must be in a mooka mood these days. But it was so much fun doing this one, too.

The zen seems to be back, and I'm feeling inspired and energetic. I made a bunch of tiles from a piece of tiepolo paper I bought from DaVinci art supply online, and am enjoying very much stringing them and tangling.

Three I have finished for  3x3 ensemble piece.

And eager to do some more.

Joey and Diva joint challenge entry

Just a quick post today.

For some reason, tripoli doesn't really turn me on. I see other people's works and find them enjoyable to look at, but I can't get into it much. I did a page with a variety of tripoli's on it, and didn't like it. Then I thought of my little stash of bijou tiles, and this is what I made:

Coloring these was fun. See the little inchy in the upper right. Just a smidgen of tripoli.

Because I like the star pattern created when you get a little way into tripoli, I made three, with different interiors.

 

Then I went with that sort of rounded effect that happens when you go forward with tripoli.
And of all of them, I think this is my favorite.

a tripoli star, with some tripoli in prisma, in the background.So, got that out of the way. Maybe if I played with it some more, I'd really like tripoli. It's okay just not my fave.

Joey continues with the delightful challenge of giving us a tile with a bit of a start on it, like the traveling tangles FB page. This week, tipple in the corners!

And this is what I made. It is still in progress.

 The main string is a letter M, because it might end up being for a co worker named Megan. I need to at least do some shading, and then decided what to do with it. Maybe it'll end up staying in my sketchbook.

And, speaking of traveling tangles, I created three and posted them, and expecting to see three tiles in my mail. I can't wait!

I sent these out...soon to find something in my mailbox!

Diva Spill AND Joey's "traveling" Tile Challenges

This week, what fun! The Diva Laura Harms spilled and got inspired hahahaha

so, the idea is to slosh your coffee or your tea or what have you, onto a tile, and tangle.

So tangle away, I did!

I started by stirring my green tea with lemon and honey with the mug sitting on the tile. Some good little sloshes...that didn't show up AT ALL. Except now there's a shiny sticky spot from the honey, probably. With green tea not really working, I put some frozen berries on the tile, let them thaw, and ended up with a lovely purple splotch.

I wish I had taken before pics, because the splotch was interesting, sort of like a gingko leaf. Oh, well. As it was, narwal came to mind so I tried it. And niuroda and  some printemps and maryhill.

Narwal kind of disappears into the splotch/niuroda area. I need to practice that one some more. 

Now, for Joey's challenge. Finishing a tile someone else starts is pretty cool. I may have to jump in at FB and see what it's all about. :) In the mean time, here is the Joey challenge. 

the tangle is Villers #2 

and this is what I did with it. 

It has been a while since I did anything on toned paper, and I had some gray card stock so I went with it.

When I started this, I wasn't liking it much, but putting the highlights on along with the shading was so much fun, and it ended up looking a lot cooler. Too bad about that graphite in the upper left...the glare! But it doesn't look like that in person.

Both of these were fun challenges. I want to get out my "spill" tiles from when Laura presented this as a challenge a few years ago.

  this was berry juice, too. And I was scared of color, didn't know what to do with it, so I did this funky alien cave thing. ha! It was fun then, and it is fun now. 

Some Challenges, Some Sketchbook

It's been a while since I sat down and really wrote anything here, so I thought I'd give it a spin before my day really starts. Brekkie in my tummy, tea at my elbow, and here we go.

The coolest thing in the past few weeks was the Journey/Doobies concert I went to with my feller Wylie. Two years ago, going to see Journey was our first date, so this was a fun throwback for us.

Me, and Wylie. His best friend has cancer, so he shaved his head in solidarity, and now goes around with his sexy do rag hahahaha!

the Doobie Brothers have been a favorite band of mine since I was 15 years old. They are super danceable, and so SO good. The sax, the violin...the wailin guitar. Awesome!

There was a HUGE crowd there. Usana amphitheater is an outdoor venue, with seating near the stage, and a grassy hillside sloping up for the less expensive seats. We brought a blanket and some short legged chairs...and a flask with fireball in it shhhh don't tell.






Then JOURNEY! wow, did the people roar! Journey really knows how to rock it.

they had an amazing light show, and a screen on stage where you could see close ups of the band playing. The highlight of the concert was an absolutely stunning, jaw dropping drum solo by Steve Smith. About five minutes of jammin...just amazing. I made some art trying to depict it

You can see the light show in the upper right corner, and the drums as seen on the big screen on stage in upper left, then there's a cluster of printemps in the bottom centerish, which would be the actual drum set, with a wall of nzeppel (rock...gettit?)

I love this concept, but made the mistake of coloring things in...not liking it so much now. But it was fun to do.

The lights go down in the city...YAY JOURNEY!!!

 everyone holding up their virtual lighters hahahaha

Light show is a pattern that cropped up for me that night, falling asleep after the concert

LIGHT SHOW

 They had magenta, pacific blue, brilliant white, yellow, and green lights that swept the stage and the audience. Very cool. I tried to capture the motion and energy. I will create step outs for this one.

Now, on to the challenges. 

There are two challenges I wanted to post to this week, in one blog post. The Diva challenge was to use ING in a piece. This is a cool pattern based on a structure that Marie and Rick saw somewhere, but it always reminds me of the Olympic torch in Salt Lake City

with the summer Olympics just ending in Rio, and me not participating in that challenge, maybe this could be a double challenge item heh. 

Anyway, ING does remind me of the Olympic torch from when we hosted the 2002 Winter Olympics whichwasverycoolandiwishtheywouldcomehereagain.

Salt Lake became a more sophisticated place, and we still benefit from the changes that we frantically made in preparation. The Trax system alone is worth what we put up with, getting it up and running. But we also still have the various ice skating venues available for use, and improvements at the ski resorts, etc that people play in/on all the time.

Well...ING then.

the string I made for this looked like a road disappearing over the horizon, so i went with that a bit. Btweed road, with a cluster of printemps and rock flower (another possible pattern I made up after the Journey concert)...and ING towers sort of following the road...see how they seem to get smaller? I did perspective!

ING seems like a pattern that would be fun to do as a border, too. Hmmm...

Well then, Joey is doing a very cool thing for challenges currently. Taking a page from the awesome traveling tangles project on FB, Joey gives us a "starter" pattern, and we are to create a piece using her "tile"

Though i didn't post last week, I did make a tile using that fun paradox triangle

 Paradox surrounded by Ditto edging, and my own Flysh in the upper right corner. I invented that one when I was practicing ditto for the first time a couple of years ago. Along the bottom, another tangle I like to play with. I call it Smoke, but it also has some flux elements to it and maybe a bit of Henna Drum. It is more of a tangleation than a new invention, IMO.

So, that was last week's challenge from Joey.


This week, she gave us a little nugget of sparkle

  and we get to finish it however we want...

Sparkle is so much fun, I made a bunch of em.

 Then, indyrella has the same shape, but with the energetic, highly textured lines.

Carrying that theme of many lines stacked up,

I put zinger in there.

Then, wanting to mirror the swirly stuff in Sparkle, I used my tombow tan pen for Verve.

To be honest, I doubt that the black and tan really works that well together...unless we're talking about stout beer. hahahahaha! But, it is what it is, and at any rate, I love how the shading looks in this one. 

Now, here are a bunch of pics from my sketchbook, with minimal commentary:

SAMPLER

Umble, Undling, Aloha, Beelight, Printemps, Butter, Nzeppel, Bumps. In the center, some lozenge shapes with ribbons and strings around some of them, Aquafleur style. 

TENDRILS

HOLLIBAUGH WUD

This one to the right was for a challenge at our Intermountain Gathering...we were to create a piece using our initials. H for Hollibaugh/Heidi and W for Wud/Whitney. I made this while watching a movie Song of the Sea, a very artistic, creative animation about the legend of the Selkie. BEAUTIFUL movie. Visually amazing. This piece has some of the same values/qualities of the movie. Spirals, organic, subtle background details. 

COUNTRYSIDE

GARDEN WALL

This isn't from my sketchbook, but from the Ben Kwok book Wildlife Design. It is my most recent completion from that book. First time playing with zengems in quite some time. Fun to do! There is a terrific Facebook page called Ornation Creation, if anyone is interested. Ben posts templates, and invites anyone who wants to, to use them for tangling in. Not only from his books, but current works he develops. It's pretty cool to see the creativity there.

And to finish off, a page from when Skye first came out, and I spent some time playing with it.

So you see, even though I haven't posted much, I've kept myself busy with creating. Good fun!