Circling Around

Greetings to all.

First of all YAY it's my day off! and very welcome it is. Nothing like being a drone bee, a cog in the machine, a wage slave. Thank you Lord for a job. I pay my bills, I live in not my car...I own a car that has new tires on it as of last Thursday. So yes, a job is a good thing and I am GLAD TO BE AWAY FROM THAT PLACE FOR TWO DAYS!

 And my cat, and Wylie's cat, and Wylie love me. And others do, too.

Joey gave us a very cool circle string this week to play with, and a fun tangle: Gnarly. But we'll come back to that.

I wanted to display a few pages from my sketchbook. I found a terrific tangle pattern website called
pattern collections I think the Shading Zentangle page on FB is where I first linked into pattern collections.com but when I did I really liked it. One of the features there is a tutorial series called Grid Journey, packed with ideas on playing with grid patterns.

 The first "lesson" is similar to the seed grid idea that Maria and Rick talk about at their website:  Take the elements of a grid, whatever lines and curves are inside ONE square of the grid, and playing with that. Turn the page, put them all in the same corner for a new type of pattern, or reverse/mirror them.

This is the  pattern Blooming Petal which I played around with, using those ideas. Isn't it something, how different the same pattern can look, depending on how you put them together?

The second lesson is about making a grid pattern into a ribbon...thusly:

 Backsplash, Clem, Egyp, and 3-D Room, as ribbons. Neat, eh?











Okay so that fun website. today I plan on getting into lesson 3 in the Grid Journey.

Other sketchbook stuff, just random lines and forms.

 Got my Eni Oken shading book out and played around with it.
See that section of Skye? and I love the little flower bud I doodled. Shading does amazing things to a piece of art.

Inspired by a Vivian Maier photo

Playing with Loopy Blossom. This has turned out to be a fun pattern for me. There is plenty of scope for creativity here. I wonder if I can do that grid seed thing with it. It' is kind of a grid based pattern, but not rigid...hmmm.








Now, without further adieu...ado?...ehem. without further ado,

Joey's Challenge

A large circle, with a narrow circle inside of it, and the pattern Gnarly.

Because I had my pencils out for another piece to color...oh! wait. this is funny. A co worker stopped by my cubicle, saw the myriad works displayed and said "oh, you're into that coloring craze" and I said...Well, yeah But I made those and THEN colored them. hahaha. He was duly impressed...

Anyway, I had been busy coloring in a page that I didn't like, just plain AND with shading on my mind, it was easy to choose the way I should go with this challenge. Gnarly is shaded subtly with cool grays and the center is hollibaugh, also minimally enhanced with shading and each section colored in boldly with jewel tones. Gee wiz, I ended up liking this. very satisfying to do, and I think it's fun to look at. The only thing I haven't decided yet is, do I do anything with the background behind gnarly. There is not so much as a cast shadow there. But this way it looks airy and light, doesn't it. Hmm.