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.

 

An Inky Experiment

A fellow ICADian Suzanne Hershey Ford recently posted a little art experiment that I thought I would like to try.  She took flower blossoms and made them into an ink/watercolor by boiling them.  I found some instructions on-line that said you could just pour boiling water on them and let them sit for a while which appealed to me more so I looked around for some blossoms.  

The redbuds were blooming in the yard and were fast approaching the "browning" stage but I managed to collect about a half cup of them.  I spooned boiling water over them and let them sit for a couple of hours but they did not give up any detectible color.

All or most of the daffodils in the yard are done, and we do have other flowers planted but they're much too young to give up enough of their blossoms for this experiment.  Then I looked around inside.  HWNSNBP had "found" a forgotten potted amaryllis bulb in the basement about a week or so ago that was sending up it's flower spike.  It did bloom late last week, but the blossoms were beginning to fade so I picked off the two nearly shriveled ones and tried the boiling water again.

I also noticed that one of my orchid plants had suddenly dropped all of it's blooms and they still had some color in them so why not try these also.

As you can see from the photos above, the amaryllis gave up some good color but the orchids not so much.  There was just the faintest hint of color from them.

So I got out some watercolor paper and started playing around.  I wet the paper and dripped the color on it first and let that dry.  Then I loaded the brush with the liquid and layered some circles on, letting it dry between layers.

On this one I just used the paintbrush pressed lightly onto the paper to make flower petals.  In between the flowers I used the orchid ink in dots to see what it would look like dry.  

When these were dry I took out a sepia and burgundy micron pens and outlined the circles and the flowers.  I also added some white gel pen to the circles and the centers of the flowers.  I used colored pencils to turn those orchid ink dots into flower centers by giving them their own petals pushing them to a lower layer.  

The next test of these would be to see how long the ink lasts when exposed to sunlight.  I think I'm going to test adding Micro Glaze over these to make them into oversized postcards.  We shall see over time.  In the meantime, I'll probably be keeping my eye out for more colorful petals to experiment with.