Drawings and C time

The Diva's challenge this week is to use the new official zentangle pattern, Drawings. For some reason I've had the hardest time with Drawings. I love how it looks, and I've done other similar patterns with no problem. But Drawings just never looks good to me when I draw it. I've practiced it a lot, too...

Here are some pages of my practice with Drawings...Hmmm. I really want to get comfortable with this one. It's so pretty, but I've never been satisfied with how I draw it.



Different "feathers", different "spokes"...with glimmers, shading, different shapes, .... ah well. I'll probably play with it some more.

 Centered and encircling is cool looking....copied some ideas straight out of other artists' samples...

Well, this is the one I am entering in the challenge. It is part of a Traveling Tangles project. Kirsten Kostelnik sent me several 3Z tiles with starts. In this case, the start was that gilded Cat Kin along the edge. I added the Drawings and bead lines, with some gold gelly pen as highlights.









And, a weekly challenge I haven't done for a while, Joey's. There's been traveling tile style challenges over there since before Xmas, and after the new year, she started putting letters of the alphabet on the tile starts with one tangle starting with that letter.

This week the string is a C and the starter tangle was Cat Kin. I added Capell on the C, and Caught in the background. It was on a dawn pink tile made of Canson paper, from the open stock at Blick. Because of the pink tile, I went with pink for my patterns. Fun :)

At Blick I also bought some Bristol paper to make my tiles with for the next little while. See what a smoother finish is like, rather than the rough tooth of the Tiepolo paper I've been using. Oooh, and also bought some Faber Castell oil based pencils...going to build a collection of them, to go with my prismacolors. Wow, do they ever blend nicely!

In other art challenges, I continue with the "memory lane" challenge from a FB friend, and here are three of the pictures I rendered:

I had fun doing EVERY single one of these...I didn't get to this challenge the last two days, but I'll pick a photo soon and do it. It is so enjoyable! I've not done much realism, but never really felt good at art...now Zentangle has got me out of my "can't do art" shell and I find it to be lots of fun.

One other thing....I really love Van Gogh's art. He did terrific landscapes and night scapes. And frankly one of the greatest things about Vincent's art is the strokes of paint themselves. There is one called Starry Night over the Rhone...WOW! the little blue strokes around the stars! they really do add to the overall greatness of his art.

Well, when he painted Cypress trees, his strokes were spirals and swirls. So...I developed a pattern based on Vincent's cypress tree strokes.

this one works amazingly with a dark green and dark blue/indigo blend...and I JUST love it! Going to put it in something that I work on, this very day!