Two Adult Drawing Pages

The second of three posts for today.

I have done a couple more adult drawing pages, both downloaded from here.

I wasn’t that thrilled with the first one, to be honest – not such an interesting picture, and I did it with coloured pencils which didn’t come out very bright. Being poppies, I think I would have done better to use my Sharpies to get more intense colour.

Here is the original printed drawing.

This is what I did with it.

The second one, however, I was very pleased with. For starters, I much preferred the picture, which had lots of potential for shading and different colouring.

This time I decided to use my Inktense pencils, which, true to their name, have intense colour. Being ink, once dry, they do not run and you can add more layers on top if you want, without re-activating what you have already done. Not that I did that in this case, though. I love the way they blend so well together with the application of a little water on a brush. They are quite sticky and waxy to use, and don’t run on as smoothly as regular coloured pencils and I certainly wouldn’t use them if I wasn’t going to add water afterwards. Adding water with the brush reminds me of another favourite childhood activity – magic painting! Who remembers that (or am I giving away my age!)… You had a greyish looking page with outlines drawn on it, and you would paint it just with water, and the colours would spring to life!

If you look carefully, you can see that I added some lines to the drawing, to make the trellis weave over and under, and added some little nails to hold it together! I think that makes it look better, particularly with the shading.

For the butterflies, I used a combination of Twinkling H2Os and Perfect Pearls. I bought a couple of little packs of the former at Hobbycraft recently and hadn’t yet tried them. Frankly I was a bit disappointed, after reading raves from people about them online. For starters, the packs I got seemed only to have pinks and browns in them which wasn’t terribly useful for butterflies. When I started using the Perfect Pearls instead, I think I was getting more intense colour and more shimmer from them than from the Twinklings, which surprised me a lot. Maybe I need to experiment further.

After I’d added the shimmer colours to the butterflies, I went around the outlines again with a permanent black marker because some of the lines had become indistinct where I’d gone over them.

Anyway, I was very pleased with the results – the butterflies are really shimmery! They stand out in contrast against the background. Of course, most of this doesn’t show up on the photos, but I’ve done my best to do them justice.

I am having fun experimenting with different media for these adult colouring pages. I must try good old-fashioned watercolours, acrylics, mixed media, foiling, embossing, pastels and chalks… the possibilities are endless! One thing I have learnt, especially from my experience with the poppies one, is that you need to choose the correct medium for the picture, so that you do it justice. Soft, subtle colours do not work on an image which calls for bright, vibrant shades.

Valentine Card 2014

I have had several people ask me to post about the card I’ve made this year for my hubby, so here it is.

The finished size is A5, and the words spell “Love” in several languages – English, Romanian, Italian (and other Latin languages) and Hebrew. The colour was added using my Derwent Inktense pencils. The design was inspired by a doodled heart I found on Pinterest: http://www.flickr.com/photos/helloangel/9826670843/

Inside:

This is the first time I’ve made him a Zentangle card and he was very pleased with it! When he gets the opportunity, he enjoys kite-flying.

Perfect Pearls–Preparing for Use

Now that I have got my lovely big selection of Perfect Pearls (still missing some colours but I’ve certainly got enough to be going on with for now), I needed to prepare them so I could use them with maximum versatility.

The first thing to do was to remove the barcode label from each pot, which acted as a seal. Why, oh why can’t they use peelable labels??!! What a nightmare peeling them off! They were very hard to remove and left a nasty sticky residue, which had to be wiped off with some Crafter’s Companion Stick Away sprayed onto a piece of kitchen paper. The whole thing took an inordinate amount of time… (There are some things I have endless patience for, but not this.)

That done, I took some scraps of black card and cut them to approximately 1.5 x 2 inches, and wrote the name of the individual colours on each one with my embossing pen, and then applied the respective Perfect Pearl with the soft brush designed for the purpose. When they were all done, I spritzed them with water to fix the powder (which activates the binding agent, which I am reliably informed is Gum Arabic).

The black card shows off the colours to their best advantage, applied in this way. Unfortunately the picture doesn’t do them justice – they are gorgeous and really glow with that metallic sheen that Perfect Pearls possess. Some of the colours, notably Plum, Kiwi and Berry Twist, are dichroic, and change colour as you turn them in the light – I think the powder is acting as a diffraction grating in the same way as butterfly wings and peacock feathers, whose colours are not due to pigment, but to the surface breaking up the light waves and diffracting them into rainbow colours. Beautiful!

Next step was to punch a small hole in the corner of each one and bind them as a little swatch book for future reference. I can move the “pages” around and bring out different ones to compare how they go together.

Next problem – where am I going to store all my new Perfect Pearls? Too many now, to go in the small drawer I used to use for them. For now, they’ve gone in a redundant cardboard box that became too small for what was in it before!

Now I was ready to create my Perfect Pearls Palette, following Christie’s excellent instructions on her blog.

This is going to make using my Perfect Pearls as watercolours so much easier! I decided on a layout, spreading out the pots of Perfect Pearls in order and making a plan. I deliberately left gaps for the colours not yet in my collection, should I want to add them later. I arranged them in groups of type and colour.

Next I designed a label to go inside the lid. For this, I used Serif PagePlus, my desktop publishing software. The circles are 1 inch in diameter, exactly the same size as the depressions in the palette.

The straight lines are cutting guides. The sheet had to be cut into four as the palette has four ridges across the inside of the lid and a single sheet would not lie flat. Christie used her Dymo label maker to create small transparent labels for each colour, but I do not have one of these, so I this was my solution. After cutting the sheet into the four sections, I rounded the corners and glued each one into its respective space, lining up the printed circles with the circular depressions in the palette, using a small dab of Pinflair gel glue in each corner. I have created labels for all the available colours of Perfect Pearls, although I do not yet have them all; if I want to add to my collection, the spaces are available for them. I have uploaded this template to my Skydrive, and this can be freely downloaded if anyone wants to follow this tutorial.

Printed on inkjet acetate which has a coating, they were glued inside the lid of the box with the coated (printed) side against the plastic of the lid, so that the printing is protected, and shows through the lid the right way round.

Here is the palette with the labels attached.

Here is the dry powder being mixed with water in the palette.

You can see that I’ve made a bit of a mess of this. Christie recommends putting quite a lot of powder in, and then adding the water, but after doing this for the first one, I found it much easier to put in a smaller amount, add some water, then some more powder, some more water, etc. until there was enough – mixing it was then a lot less messy. Also, I didn’t have a water dropper bottle like hers, so I thought I’d spritz it with water – biiiig mistake – DON’T do this!! The spray squirted the Perfect Pearls powder all over the place! (Hence the mess being even worse.) Eventually I found an eye dropper which worked perfectly. I also used my little plastic glue spatula which was ideal because it was flexible, and square at the end so it got right into the corners of the depressions in the palette. I used a plastic teaspoon to ladle the powder into the palette.

The completed palette being left to dry. (You can see that my technique improved as I progressed through the palette! Definitely less messy.)

Christie recommends leaving it to dry before attempting to clean up any mess, and then gently blowing or brushing away any powder. If any of the mess was wet, and stuck on, it can be cleaned away with a damp cotton bud (Q-tip).

When they are dry, these Perfect Pearls in the palette can be used as one would use a watercolour box, with a wet brush to pick up the colour. I intend using my water brushes (that I use to colour my zentangles with Derwent Inktense pencils) because it will be a lot more convenient than normal brushes, and I will be able to do it away from my ARTHaven.

The third way that I use Perfect Pearls is in the form of DIY Glimmer Mists – I did a tutorial about this way back when I first started, before I even had my ARTHaven, following a tutorial of Tim Holtz, mixing Perfect Pearls, Distress Re-Inkers and water in spritzing bottles – you can vary the combinations ad infinitum, very cheaply!

Perfect Pearls are an incredibly versatile medium. You can get an intense metallic or iridescent pearlised finish when they are applied in concentrated form with water, a softer look when applied dry with a soft brush onto stamped or hand-drawn images in Versamark and fixed by spritzing with water, or a subtle, pearlised effect by applying in spray form. They are something I would not be without in my arsenal, and I am delighted that I now have a much more comprehensive collection. I am particularly thrilled with those with dichroic properties.

I bought two of these palettes, and eventually I am going to make a similar palette of my alcohol inks – another idea I got from Christie. When creating the labels for the Perfect Pearls palette, I also saved a blank version of the template, so that I can insert the names of the different colours of alcohol ink. Watch this space!

 

P.S. Remember the other day that I posted about how I lost my Tim Holtz Design Ruler, and bought another (longer) ruler to replace it? Well, as per my prediction, my original one has turned up today! Typical… I found it lurking in my for-sale box of mixed media mirrors. Duh. Oh well, s’pose you can never have enough rulers…

Zentangle–More ATCs and Some Tags

I’ve made a few more ATCs for the WOYWW ATC swap, and completed the little fan tags to go with them, so that I can at last send them off to the remaining people on my list who still haven’t received them (sorry for the delay, folks!) – if anyone else still wants to swap, that’s absolutely fine, as I can always make more.

Here are the seven that I completed yesterday.

Here they are individually so that you can see the detail.

Yellow flowers:

Leafy Garland:

Pincushion:

Wind-Filled Sail:

Swan:

Pods:

Seed Pod:

These are three of the little fan tags I have made to accompany them. I have had fun experimenting with some of my new Perfect Pearls – some of the dichroic ones are simply gorgeous. As usual, photographs don’t do justice to this kind of finish.

Zentangle: More ATCs and some Miniature Art

Warning – lots of pictures, but I’ve tried to keep them small!

As I started to recover from my really rough week of feeling poorly, I reclined on the recliner (best place for reclining imo lol!!) and worked on some more ATCs for the WOYWW swap that’s been going on. Everyone who has sent me their gorgeous ATCs (thanks everyone!) has been most patient with me, and they can rest assured that their ATCs will soon be on the way, but before sending them off I photographed them and thought I’d share them on here. In due course, I shall be doing a post about all the ATCs I’ve received.

I haven’t yet decided who’s getting what, so you’ll just have to wait and see!

Here’s a variation on the Three Fish with Seaweed, with a bit more detail in it than the original one:

Another Poppies ATC (this one doesn’t really qualify as a zentangle as there aren’t any patterns on it):

Herbaceous Border:

Fields:

Pebbles:

I love the current craze for the variations on the old WWII poster “Keep Calm and Carry On” – you can “Keep Calm” and “do whatever you like” these days, and some of the variations are great fun! (Reminds me of the car stickers that said “xyz do it…” my favourite being “Cornishmen do it drackly”!!! Lol! But I digress…) This is my take on it, specially for the WOYWW birthday (should have put 3 candles on really – only thought of it when it was too late!) – Keep Calm and Eat Cake! (Since photographing this one, I have been over the candle flame and letters with Glossy Accents.)

I also did three black and white ones which I think have come out really well. I love working with colour, but I always come back to black and white which has such impact, being pattern and monochrome shading alone. The first is Vortex:

Dress Form (this is a theme I am considering developing):

and finally, Serpentine. (Hope the recipient of this one isn’t frightened of snakes – it’s just a pattern so nothing to be afraid of!) Some of the patterns have a definite resemblance to snakeskin so I thought I’d combine them in a nice snake-in-the-grass design.

In all my zentangle art you will notice my favourite patterns recurring – there’s a huge vocabulary of patterns out there, but I do have certain favourites that I tend to use again and again because they are lovely to look at, interesting to do, and relatively easy.

Here’s a picture of all the zentangle ATCs I’ve done to date, with the exception of the couple that have already been sent out.

I’ve just realised I haven’t uploaded the photos of the coloured cards I did for the craft show. What I did with these was to draw the black and white outlines and scan them, so that I could print them out and colour them afterwards. This meant that when I want to do more cards, I can repeat the process, and maybe alter the colour scheme if I want, and save some time. Now I’ve got photos of the coloured ones I can just print them out and use them, too. These little pictures measure 3 x 3 inches square, ready for matting and layering onto A6-sized cards.

Starfish:

Octopus:

Necklace 1 (blue):

Necklace 1 (purple):

Necklace 2:

Pineapple:

Clown Fish:

Elephant (I’ve become quite fond of him!):

Cheese Plant (I particularly like how this turned out, using just a subtle suggestion of pattern without bordering lines):

Blue Tropical Fish – this one shows particularly well the blending capabilities of the Derwent Inktense pencils:

Tutti-Fruiti Ice Cream:

Chocolate Mint Chip Ice Cream:

Blue Kimono:

Purple Kimono:

Hopefully I shall now be getting back into the swing of things again. First step, get these ATCs ready for posting, and biggest decision of all, trying to decide who gets what! Then I shall replenish my stock of zentangle cards and honour the various orders for them, and the coasters, that I’ve had – if anyone else wants coasters I will have to put in an order for them. I’ve got the 2 original boxed sets (Design Set 1 and Design Set 2) and also some individual ones mounted in plastic. More on this later.

Thanks for your patience, everyone!