I seem to really love Soul Star even though I don’t really do it justice. I like it almost as much as I did Cadent and Paradox when I first started tangling back in 2009. It seems that it is what comes to mind quickly and I am enjoying drawing.

This week I got some new art supplies but I’ll share about that next week. One of my new purchases was some watercolor pencils and I’ve been wanting to try them out.

So all I did was tangle Soul Star largely on my tile. Here is the lineart.

Yeah, I know, the lineart is not that great. I’m always so thankful for shading. This time I tried my hand at some color. If you remember last week I added just a bit of color. I added a bit more this time around because I had watercolor pencils.

So here it is colored.

Here’s what’s up. I like blues and purples right now. Then I remembered that you should use a color opposite on the color wheel for contrasting. Orange is opposite blue, so I attempted to put orange in the middle but my orange was more yellow than orange. So then I got out some pearly watercolors and added a dab on each orb (I’m thinking I’ll make some large orbs next time I use this tangle–if I remember) and add some in the middle.

Then I went back and used graphite to shade the sections I left white and the one side of the “spokes.” All in all, I like how it turned out, especially for my first use of these supplies.

Here are some pictures I took; I didn’t get natural lighting because it was dark out by the time I finally got this done and that’s saying something considering it’s summer and it stays light so late now.

So, what tips do you have for me? Thanks for stopping by. I appreciate your kind comments.

Until next time, God bless,

Michele ºÜº

Wow! You all were so kind in your comments last week. It is always so encouraging to read what you have to say about what you liked and if you have any suggestions for my improvement. I’m still so new to this, in my opinion. So thank you! Thank you so much!

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This week’s diva challenge is a duotangle which means I cannot really combine it with any other challenges this week. Although Shading Zentangle has a watercolor challenge this week and I might could attempt combining the two but I think the results would not be as desirable as hand-picking tangles to attempt Jo Flaherty’s style, which is more inclined to large open tangles than ones with a lot of little lines.

So first up is my Diva Challenge tile. I put Paradox in a triangular shape on the bottom half of my tile and then Diva Dance: Rock’n’roll above it. I should’ve put it so diva dance overlapped paradox instead of the other way around but I dealt with it.

Diva Dance Rock-n-Roll is not my best tangle so I googled it to get inspired. I found this simplified version: http://www.everythingis-art.com/2016/11/divadancesimplified.html and did something similar.

I took several work-in-progress pictures this time, since people seem to like them a lot. So here we go.

Here’s the finished tile before shading.

I struggled with the shading of paradox. I erased it twice and ended up doing it the same way again.

I didn’t sign it because I wasn’t sure if I was done yet. I considered putting paradox on both bottom corners as well but in the end decided to just leave it. I was afraid of messing it up AND I wanted time to play with the small set of Tim Holtz distress markers I got for the Shading Zentangle challenge.

So the first step was to pick some tangles that were large and curvaceous. I collected a few. Here’s a lazy picture of my notes, I’d already uploaded my work-in-progress photos from my camera (an iphone and computer is not, so it likes to be finicky), had my dried tile on the scanner bed and had gotten comfortable in my chair to get down to work. So I used the laptop camera to get a quick snapshot, so it isn’t the best but at least you can see what I had noted.

I ended up going with the elongated version of Joki by Kim Aarts, Flips-C by YuRu Chen, and ‘Nzeppel an official Zentangle tangle. I didn’t want to make Joki so big that there wasn’t any room for any other tangles; so I ended up making it a little bit on the small side.

Learning from that opportunity, I drew Flips-C a bit larger. Then I added ‘Nzeppel behind it all, making sure that I made the grid large. Unfortunately, I think it ended up being a bit too large. Oh well, lesson #2 learned.

It's a little blurry because I was too lazy to get up and put it in the scanner, so I just took the picture with my phone and it must've shook a little or something. Oh well, at least it's here.

Then I started adding color. This is the first time using these Tim Holtz Distress Markers, so I didn't know how dark or bright they'd be or even how to use them really.

I almost think I should have left it like this.

I added more color.

Here you can see I started adding some purple to the outer sections of 'nzeppel to give it some contrast.

By this time my paper is getting a bit ripply. Then I notice that Jo said not to use very much water, but I was struggleing to get the color to blend out.

Then I added a bit of dark green to the flips-c and that stupid edge line in purple. Sure wish I hadn't added that last one. Oh well, another lesson learned.

Then I looked back at the directions and saw the white highlights, so I added a some of those too.

I may work on this some more later but I have to run for now.

I'd really appreciate any tips you have for working with these markers. Thanks for stopping by!

Until next time, God bless,

Michele ºÜº