Zentangle Teabag Art–Two Thank You Cards

Now updated with video.

I have a lot to be thankful for, especially all those lovely people who have sent me cards and emails and gifts since my heart attack. Thank you, everyone, who has sent such lovely messages, by email or blog comment, or by phone or card. Today was the first day I managed to get into my ARTHaven and do anything creative for some time. I am still trying to catch up with everything that got neglected while I was in hospital and then resting at home, and as always, my art gets shoved to the bottom of the list! I want to make some cards to send to those who have been especially kind with their gifts, and an invitation out to lunch.

I am still obviously not myself because I had a field day with my video camera today – it was on standby when it should have been recording, and recording nothing when it should have been on standby! I still have to check the clips and edit them, and it may be that there is no useful footage. Also, working on such a small scale, I realised after recording the first one that it might not have been zoomed in enough to see, so I zoomed in good and proper for the second one and then discovered that I hadn’t been recording… Duh.

I also forgot to photograph the original teabag stains that I chose for the backgrounds of the two cards, so if the videos are any use, I may be able to take some stills from them.

Anyway… I do have some photos of the two finished cards. Both were based on the stains left by round teabags this time – I have not worked on these before, and I love the soft outlines. For the first one, I wanted to achieve a more pictorial and representative effect than my usual abstract designs – this card was for someone we visited the other day for lunch, and after being cooped up for so long, I really appreciated an outing, and our drive took us through the beautiful lush green Devon countryside with its gently rolling hills, and this is what I wanted to depict in miniature scale.

The sentiment on this first card was stamped using Tea Dye Distress Ink (which was also used to distress the background card which was a bit too yellow). I have had the stamp for ages and cannot tell you what it is, I am afraid.

I cut out the completed art work and mounted it on a piece of recycled packaging which had attractive striations. Originally I was going to use some torn corrugated cardboard but this was much too heavy and dominated the design.

The second one was more abstract. For the base card I used white card instead of the yellow-ish cream of the first one, and muted it down with Tea Dye Distress Ink, applied with an Inkylicious Ink Duster.

Instead of photographing this one on one of my pieces of scratch paper that I clean my brushes on, I decided to lay it on a diamond pattern sheet of teabag stains. The sentiment on this one was hand-written.

In both designs, I outlined much of the staining detail left by the drying teabag on the watercolour paper, and then added a few patterns, trying to leave a little white space. To do the drawing I used a Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pen (super fine) in sepia, which is my preferred pen for Zentangle teabag art. These pens are archival, water- and light-fast, and lovely to work with. I also tried using my ancient pastel pencils for shading, which was a first. It didn’t require much, and then I smudged it with a paper stump. Before I did the shading I thought the designs looked very flat and the patterns were not differentiated sufficiently from one another. In the Devon Hills one, I also added a touch of blue, and a touch of teal, to indicate the sky and the sea and river. Finally, I gave both designs a light spray with fixative. I hope I have achieved a good representation of our beautiful local countryside with all its variety, not to mention the changeable weather!

I have several more to do, and to prepare for a bit of a production line, I designed a back piece with Serif PagePlus, my desktop publishing software, giving details of how the technique was done, and a short explanation of Zentangle. This was printed on the left half of a landscape piece of A5 card, which was then folded in readiness for the front embellishment.

Watch this space – if I haven’t made a complete pig’s dinner of the videos, I’ll upload them in due course!

Teabag Art with Zentangle

I have now finished the large watercolour paper that I’ve been drying the teabags on, and this is the result.

I love how some of the impressions have creases on them where the teabag wasn’t touching. Here are some detailed shots of the impressions.

It struck me that these shapes could be used as instant Zentangle strings complete with shading, so I took my sepia permanent marker pen and started to add some patterns. As they are very small, I used my clip-on magnifier so that I could see better what I was doing.

Some detail shots.

If you look at the detailed shot of the original teabag drying sheet you will see that I have drawn around the creases and marks, and the outline of each shape. I have also left some “white” space in each one to emphasise the small amount of pattern that I have added.

I think there is definitely some potential here! I would like to try drawing some Zentangles directly onto some actual teabags, but they would need to be sized first with acrylic gel medium or clear gesso… Lots to think about.

More from the Flower Factory

I’ve done a few more flower and leaf pieces today. These were cut a little while ago, not from watercolour paper, but from some white card with a slight texture to it – this cut quite well, but it isn’t as absorbent as watercolour paper so the colours aren’t quite as intense when sprayed with the Dylusions Inks, until I spritz them well with water and smoosh them in the stray ink on my craft sheet.

I sprayed two lots today – quite a large quantity of hibiscus flower pieces in two sizes, and one large rose, with a mixture of blue, turquoise, purple and pink sprays, and leaves in two sizes – lots of small ones for the hibiscus flowers, and some large ones for the large roses.

Here are the flower pieces. As with the smaller roses, the larger ones consist of five separate pieces and one leaf piece. I have cut these with more ragged edges to give a slightly different effect – they are adapted from Penny Duncan’s Rose Design, to look more like what she calls her Grungey Rose. The smaller pieces are the hibiscus flowers. I have got two more sets of rose pieces which I shall spray with another colour.

Here are the leaf pieces for each type of flower. The hibiscus leaves are cut as three separate leaves for each flower, which makes more work than the leaves that are cut as a single piece (like the large rose leaves at the top) – I may adapt the svg file along these lines to save work in the future.

As before, these flower and leaf pieces will be hand embossed before assembly.

Here are the background sheets created from these pieces. First the flower one. In this first picture you can see the flower pieces to the side, and my increasing circles stencil laid on top of the background in preparation for sponging away some of the ink.

The finished background piece, with some more of the purple ink added; I also laid down the large rose pieces to enable them to pick up a bit more ink, and after spritzing, I sponged the background again around these flowers so that I could get a bit more of the masking effect.

I luuuurve these colours!

Now for the leaf background. You will remember from my earlier post that I wasn’t very happy with the leafy backgrounds I created at that time:

I took the larger one and used it for spraying my latest leaf pieces, and liked it a lot better afterwards! This time I didn’t use any green ink at all, but sprayed first with blue, and then with yellow, which gave a gorgeous rich green.

I’m much happier with this!

One of my friends on the Black Cat cutting machine forum suggested I combine the flower making with the faux porcelain, and create some porcelain flowers! I think this is a brilliant idea, so I’m going to have a go (thanks, Gaz!). The roses are a non-starter, though, because of the way they are constructed, but some flatter, single-piece flowers would work well, I think – and maybe I could layer them. I’ll be cutting some new pieces for this, and for more coloured ones, too – and I may combine colour with clear UTEE to give a glazed effect… So many different things to try!

Dylusions Ink Sprays–My First Attempts

Warning: Photo rich post! – but juicy! Enjoy!

Watching some of Dyan Reaveley’s videos on how to use her awesome eye-popping inks, I thought I’d better get prepared with lots of bits of paper for mopping up! These can be made into backgrounds. A while ago I found some good quality watercolour paper in my hubby’s bin – reject drawings he’d done – and I rescued them post haste as they are blank on the back! Some are a bit grubby but that doesn’t matter because they’ll be covered up anyway. I started to trim them and realised that the row of holes along the edge were complete and not ripped – he’d obviously removed them from the binding without tearing them – and these strips could be used as stencils! (Shoshi thinking outside the box lol!)

I’ve cut some approximately A5 and some A6, and I’ve also got some spare blank ATCs but that card isn’t that brilliant if you get it wet, so we shall have to see.

Colours sprayed onto 4 A6 pieces of watercolour paper which had been spritzed with water…

 Blotted off. I love the kitchen roll used as a roller to blot off the ink! These sheets will be made into “hand-made” paper later, or cut up and made into more flowers!

More colours added.
 

More water added, more colour, blotted, more water… Stencil added, more water, leave for a minute or two, blot off for ghosting effect… (See Dyan’s videos for more detail!) Oh, this is SO much fun…

I am about to do a flower swap with Judy of Judy’s Fabrications, and have decided to kill two birds with one stone and colour the flower pieces while experimenting with my new inks. (More on the flowers later.) I thought I’d use them as masks while spraying them – sprayed with ink and then water…

blotted and removed.

 

 

Backs of flowers smooshed on craft mat and then re-sprayed, and an ATC blotted against flowers…

 

 

 

 and smooshed on craft mat and resprayed…

 

and stencilled off with the perforated strips…

 

 

and again, with the honeycomb stencil… 

 

and smooshed on craft mat and resprayed…

Oh heck, look at the BACK!! NOW what am I going to do? How on earth do I choose which side to use!!!

Goodness, I haven’t had so much fun for ages.

My hubby’s just brought in a cup of tea for me so I’m going to have to tear myself away and drink it. Meantime, just look at the state of my hands… (actually, they got a LOT worse later on!)

And just look at this gorgeous kitchen paper! This is definitely not going in the bin!

I think I’d better stop this post now or it will go on forever! More later, I promise!