Since it is the first Monday in June, I expected the Diva Challenge to be a Use My Tangle challenge but I guess that will be next week since this past weekend was Laura’s Beads of Courage colour run. Thus this week’s challenge is to BEad Inspired; I went with putting beads in my tile by using Beadlines. Hmmm, I think I might do this more times than not for this particular challenge. Oh well, it is what it is.

With that part figured out, I needed to know what else I would add to the tile, so I checked Square One: Purely Zentangle’s focus tangle, which is Puffin by Jean Chaney. I’m so sorry Jean, I did not do your tangle justice but again, it is what it is. I think I would have been more successful had I drawn it bigger or practiced it a time or two but I’m in it for speedy art today and the stepout looked easy enough, so straight to the tile I went.

I decided to look for a string as a base. Sometimes I love the structure of the basic zentangle steps . . . dots, border, string . . . it makes it easier to get going sometimes. I checked patterncollections.com string for the week and randomly looked at tanglepatterns.com ‘s string #99. I decided that the arches of the first string would not be as conducive to Puffin as the structure of #99, so it won.

While on patterncollections, I checked out their pattern of the day–Deco by Cat Cole–which I liked and thought it was both simple to do and would go well with Puffin. And with that I was ready to tangle!

Here it is before shading.

My lineart sure does have room for improvement!!!

Here it is with the shading! So thankful I have learned some things about shading because it sure does make my work look tons better!

I got some doodlestix for my birthday because I’d seen some recommend using them for shading but there seems to be a bit of a learning curve to using them with graphite. Now that I’ve read the packaging, it appears they are more suited to other media. Oh well, no worries. I think the top center puffin is the one I tried using it on but went back and used a micro eraser to dab out a little of the shading, as it looked a bit muddy and had no highlight to it.

I also tried for a bit of drop shadow on the beadline. Eh, not horrible, I guess. Overall, it’s an okay tile, I guess.

Now, I want to thank previous commenters for their kind and encouraging comments last week and thank any of you that take the time to comment this week. You all are a great community!

Until next time, God bless,

Michele ºÜº