Venetian Mask Zentangle

A couple of weeks ago, when I visited Spyder’s blog for our WOYWW blog hop (What’s On Your Workdesk Wednesday), I saw the photo she posted of the beautiful Venetian mask she has. As soon as I saw it, I thought “Zentangle!!” Have a look at it in her blog post and you’ll see what I mean. I immediately contacted her and asked her permission to download the photo so I could do a drawing of it, and she went the extra mile and emailed me all the photos she’d taken of it. I was able to do a drawing from one of them.

This is the biggest piece of zentangle art I have done to date. The initial drawing was the most time-consuming, as I wanted it to be as close as possible to the original, and getting the shape and proportions exactly right took a lot of measuring and marking key points.

Filling it in with tangles was where the fun began! I think the result is striking and original – I love these masks – and I hope she is pleased with it. Thank you Spyder!

I designed the text based on Italian Renaissance handwriting for this drawing, and deliberately made it look worn.

Before I started the drawing, I did a Google image search for the Carnival of Venice and there are lots of pictures of all the beautiful costumes and masks. Lots of artistic inspiration here! It must be wonderful to be there in person, seeing all the exotic costumes and soaking up the unique atmosphere.

A note about paper. When I first started zentangling, I was putting all my drawings in an Art Journal. I am now only using this for sketching new ideas and noting down step-outs for patterns, because the paper is cream-coloured and I have been having some problems photographing the drawings. A while back, I bought a large pack of cheap white card from our local copy shop, thinking it would be good for all sorts of projects, but it doesn’t fold well repeatedly, so is no good for pop-ups and other construction work, and Sheba, my Black Cat Cougar cutting machine, has turned up her nose at it and won’t cut it well, so it was relegated to making card bases with – it’s great for matting and layering onto, and it seems to take distress inks quite well. I decided to try drawing on it and it’s a positive dream – it’s a gorgeous bright white with a silky smooth finish, and the pens just glide over it with no bleeding and I love the results! It also feels nice and substantial.

Eventually I shall probably create an album (or maybe several albums of different sizes) with pages made from this card, and bound with my Cinch binder. The paper looks great matted onto black, or with a narrow black mat onto more white, as in this card that I made from my “Here’s Lookin’ at You” zentangle.