String Challenge #175, 12 Days of 3Z, Made by Joey #144 and more...

It's a String Thing Challenge #175

"Drawings"

Hi everyone! I hope you're enjoying the week before Christmas without too much stress. I have a lot to share with you today, including the 3 recipients of my "Gift of Zentangle" from the Diva's challenge last week. You can jump to the bottom to find out;-)

This time of year I starting thinking of ways to make the blog better. What is it about other blogs I love? Besides the lovely art, I enjoy the personal anecdotes, snapshots of self, home and travel I also love shared techniques, sketchbooks and processes. So here and there you might see a photo of me, my home, my cafe, my sisters cat, my beautiful city...I'm pondering including a feature in select future posts, I'm calling The Bare Bones (for now) where I take you through a tile from start to finish and share my process. I know I love it when others  share their progress through a piece and I've gotten enough feedback over the years that I thought this might be nice way to give back. Anyhoo, I'd really love to hear your thoughts when you've made it through this post;-)

Now...onto It's a String Thing Challenge #175:

Drawings seems to be the "It" pattern this month. The step-out was released last week by Zentangle HQ as part of its 12 Days of 3Z's holiday challenge. Adele kindly left the tile free of a string. 

I was very happy to break Drawings out of the confines of the tiny spaces I'd challenged myself with over the past week, cramming into the corners of some fairly crowded 3Z's;-)

I decided to just go for it...sort of. I thought a Renaissance tile would make a nice exploration of this classic shape. This did not go well. This was the catalyst to my somewhat labored account of the process I share below...but next up is the final final of The 12 Days of 3Z's:

12 Days of 3Z's 

the final mosaic

Day 12 for the 12 Days of 3Z's

pattern of the day: Huggins

I managed to get all 12 patterns onto one tile...for better or worse;-P I loved exploring the 3Z's concept. It truly adds a whole new paradigm to our world of little pieces of abstract art. The mosaic effect is quite phenomenal.

Made by Joey Challenge #144

Finish My Tile Series: Printemps and a star

I adapted Joey's tile and starter prompt to an ATC colored with art tissue. I love drawing Printemps and I just discovered the pattern "Scoodle" whilst exploring my way through all of the HQ official patterns. It's basically Printemps in an S. I also added a bit of Tipple.

Back to Drawings:

I did the orb and initial "Spine" S-curves in pencil but once I completed all of ink lines I was not happy. I didn't like the shapes of the individual "feathers" and the resolution of the ink lines at the orb was really messy...the "take-offs & landings" felt like a hot mess to me. It was at this point Icamethisclose to chucking it and starting again. After a lengthy stare down I decided to keep going and photograph each step thinking this might pan out into a post about saving a tile...or not giving up...or no mistakes...I thought I'd look to some of Maria's sketchy works which I love and continue this along those lines-pun intended;-)...

...though it never really evolved  that way. Next was where to use brown. Renaissance tiles include some brown Micron work. I was looking at one of Maria's examples of Drawings from the Step-out page (I had this page open the whole time I worked on this) and saw what looked like "Fescu" within the feathers...the image was too small on my cell phone screen to see the detail but I figured why not?

I tried cleaning up the mass of lines with some rounding and stippling. I liked the contrast of the rounding...the stippling...not so much. I was going to aura the wing tips but ended up doing crescents instead. I don't know why, but I'm glad I did because until I started the dark fill and subsequent high light, I was still ready to toss it.

I was liking the contrast of the dark bits and kept going. I like doing graduating black pearls along curves and then added the dark bits to the brown Fescu's then had to balance out the stippling.

The white gel pen highlights came next, then I added some graphite shading. finally some white pencil highlight resulted in the finished piece at the top. I was really happy with the way this came out.

I then went on to create the tile I really wanted to make based on the hits and misses from the first attempt. Of course I realized that I never would have gotten here if I'd chucked the first piece and I like them both...now.

Drawings #2

And now, the names I pulled out of my pencil bag for The Gift of Zentangle:

Annemarie of Anne's Tangle Blog

Kate of Art Lady Kate

Denise Vitola

Ladies, please email me your snail mail address to michelewynne1 (at) gmail (dot) com. I'll get your ornaments in the mail shortly.

Many thanks to all of you who visit each week and to those who take the time to comment, you all rock!