Sunday, October 1, 2023

October Arrives and Craftember is Finished

 The life cycle of a pumpkin. (Thought this was too clever not to share.)


I finished my Craftember zentangled piece last night.  I followed along with Sanntangle on FB doing one 2" square each day.   At the beginning of the month a 5x6 grid was provided with the numbers 1-30 entered randomly.   You could do the piece as one large page or break it down into square.  I already had 2" watercolor squares leftover from a past project (or maybe they were from something that didn't get done.....) so I spent a few minutes with my watercolors and gave them some life before I started to use them for this project.  In retrospect, I feel that the colors are a bit too boisterous for the pattern, and there's that one pastel pink one that's a bit out of place, but for the most part, I'm pleased with the result.


Currently it's just resting on this black poster board.  I'm trying to decide if I should spread the tiles out to "frame" each one in black or to leave it this way.  Thoughts?

I learned a couple of things while working on this.  Watercolors, and watercolor paper are not very friendly to my Microns.   It could be the application of the pigment or the pigment itself that was giving me a little problem and I went through a couple of #1's and at least one #5 Micron before this was done.  I used a white chalk pencil from a past Zentangle kit for some of the shading and again, some of the pigmented areas did not react too well with it.  I know I have a few different white pastel pencils but I have currently misplaced them.  I did add white gel pen to some parts that needed it like the dots and the lacy bits.  I may go back and use a thicker pen on some of the center radiating lines to have them jump out a little more.  The shading isn't quite doing it for me.  

So what's next?  Inktober 2023.  I have two projects on the burner.  One is using the list of tangles from 7F5R to fill in this pumpkin on black paper with white pen that "I designed" for myself.  Somehow I managed to get 31 segments exactly.  Yes, it is kind of a squatty pumpkin, but let's not do any pumpkin shaming.




The second project is Birdtober.  A list was provided by @aholmesartstudio on IG


I went through the list and googled each bird and made myself a word document with pictures of each bird that I could use for reference because I'd never heard of some of these birds.  I'm not sure what medium that I will be using but I did pull out a new small sketchbook that I think I'll be using,  Stay tuned for weekly updates as long as I get my act together.  









3 comments:

  1. Will see what you come up with!

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  2. I look forward to the birds!! Most of them I haven't heard of, though I recognise more of the Southern hemisphere ones than the North American. And the Turaco is beautiful, we spent a lot of time looking at those in the park in France where we have seen them twice.
    I think watercolour paper, and even some of the more absorbent cartridge paper is definitely not great for Micron pens - although I know that my dad often used a waterproof fineliner for drawing in outlines on watercolours. The white detailing looks great, and any bleedthrough from the pigment isn't obvious. My inclination would be a very nature black border between them, but without seeing both options it's hard to know would it work. If I were sure, I wouldn't even mat them, if just use a Sharpie directly on the squares , but that's casting everything on one throw of the dice, hazardous.

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  3. I like the fun colours of your latest creation and if you want my vote, I think I'd leave it as is because the patten is evident.
    Looking forward to seeing the results of your next challenges!

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