Friday, October 3, 2014

Diva Challenge 187: Blind String

This one was kinda fun. No pouring over the string section at tanglepatterns.com looking for something that inspired me. No brainstorming well balanced, visually pleasing strings on my own. Just draw the borders, pick up a pencil, close my eyes and draw!
This is what came out:
I kinda like it, actually!
And building on the "no planning" vibe this week, I just went through my most recent pattern pins on Pinterest and chose a few from the top. I ended up with Star Fanleaf Flower, Paisley Leaf 4 (decorated with some Dragonaire), Tami, Shauna (a fun grid pattern I used for the first time last week on my leaves), Antidots, Lanie, and Heartache.

I can't say that the final product is one of my favorites, but the process was fun and I used some new tangles that I expect will appear elsewhere in the future. I especially like Antidots, which remind me of little mussels nesting in a rocky tide pool. Lanie, the other grid pattern, I didn't actually do properly: I ended up improvising a tangleation when it started to go wrong. I'll be trying it again as written because I think it has promise!

And then, of course, I wanted to do another.  Here's my string:
And here's what happened next


Tangles include Finery, Fescue, Sandswirl, Bunzo (or are they Antidots?), N'zepple, and who knows what all else!
I was really stealing time to work on this one, and didn't make any attempt at all to shade it. I'm OK with that because there's so much color. I used both my Micron and Stabilo pens here, and as you may know the latter are not waterproof - a fact I had reason to recall when, shortly after I took the picture, my 18 month old decided to snack on the finished piece.  Oh well: it's all about the process, right?!

PS: I have a set of Microns in the default colors - red, blue, purple, brown, and green. I find that aside from the brown I am not very excited about them: too "primary." I used a brick red and chocolate brown Stabilo and in the image above, and I like them a Lot - except, again, for the lack of waterproofness (is that a word?)
Can anyone attest to the color variety in the Micron "Heritage" color collection? Is there a nice brick / burgandy red in there, and a deeper brown?
If not, are there any other brands that anyone can recommend that might have these more "earthy" colors available in a waterproof ink?
Thanks!



4 comments:

Anne's tangle blog said...

I like the first and LOVE the second one, it's really gorgeous.
I have the same problem with the Sakura color pens and have not yet found pens that I like.

Annette P.-L. said...

Like Anne, I like both of your tiles but the second is my favorite!
About the coloured pens: I used Faber Castell´s PITT artist pens in Size S. Lovely colours like dark magenta, indanthrene blue, sepia!

bmlilith60 said...

I like both tiles. As for the 18 month old and the snack, at least you got the picture first. Thank you LonettA for telling us about the pens, have to make a note to check those out.

Nata said...

Love you first string! Very nice tile you made from it too.