A Little Bit of Sketchbook Work and a Future Surprise

I grabbed one of my sketchbooks to work in over the last week.  This page started with an attempt at a mandala made from some earth mover stickers I have a roll of.  Then I decided to add the tangle Wyfore by Alice Hendon because it reminded me of the bucket parts of the earth movers even though they're basically facing the wrong way and couldn't possibly scoop anything up.  Still, it was good to practice.  

Then I drew some heart shapes touching each other and added lines to make them look a little puffy before I added some shading to make them even more dimensional. The two with the red shading were the first two I added lines to that went awry, so I made them stand out even more with the color.

More hearts.  This time I added the lines hoping to have it look like wood grain.  Thus the addition of the brown pastel pencil.  

I had seen something similar to this next one on IG.  I think it comes close to what I saw, but this is somewhat different than the neurographic pieces I've done before.  

I used some new pencils to color the "ribbons".  They are a set of 72 from Castle Arts described as their "Harmonius" collection.  I got them because the colors in the set appealed to me.  I have a few larger sets of colored pencils, but a lot of these colors are not in any of them.  They weren't that expensive for a set of that size and I wondered ahead of time if they would be of good quality and easy to use and it seems to be a yes to both of those questions.

Then it was time to switch to my Zentangle sketchbook because I saw a tutorial by Vandana Krishna to do this tile she calls Inky Umber Tile #3 on YouTube.  She used tangles SandBees, Flukes, Fragments B12, Mooka, and Flux.  And she did hers with a sepia pen in addition to the black.  I couldn't put my hands on my sepia pen right away but had the blue ones at the ready so I went in that direction.  The faint background is just pencil in this picture.  After I took the photo I found my set of gray markers and went over the pencil with the lightest shade of gray only because the pencil might smear over time.  

Next I decided to try something else with blobs, but I wound up forgetting to switch back to my regular sketchbook.  Oh well, it really doesn't matter where it is I guess because I did use some Zentangle patterns to fill in some of those blobs.

And as for the future surprise - our GS2 and GS3 are big Bluey fans.  The little guy loves to dance to the theme song and his big brother likes to hone in on the attention the little one gets so he goes a little nuts too.  I had a video of them, but I can't get it to upload.  Anyway, Bluey seems to be very popular all over the place these days and I had seen an advertisement from Home Depot for a blow up Bluey Christmas yard decoration.  I checked with Rachel first before ordering and she said okay, so they will be getting this to put on their new deck for the holidays.