Diva Challenge #246: Save the Trees!

Theoretically, I didn’t have the time for this week’s challenge (I urgently have to tangle the new blog header for winter!), but this week’s challenge really spoke to me so I HAD to squeeze it in before doing other stuff.

The challenge #246 was issued by India’s first CZT, Dilip Patel, who asked us to choose only one tangle of our liking and to tangle a tree with it. I decided to tangle an ATC and chose Diva Dance for my tangle because I love it and think it’s a great tangle for creating bark and foliage alike. However, I’m not sure if my contribution ist really a monotangle because I drew the city in the background.. But I do hope it counts.

Tangles used: Diva Dance (and tangleation)

This ATC was drawn with Sakura Pigma Mikrons in Black, Blue and Green as well as Faber-Castell Polychromos coloured pencils.

Hope you like this week’s contribution! 🙂

Living in the Shades: One Zentangle a Day – Day #4

Completely ignoring how the book is split up – working on one chapter each day – I tangled the tile for day 4 right after tangling the second tile for day three. I think that if you’re in a flow, you should use that momentum to charge ahead!

Day 4 was all about the tangle enhancer shading and how it can totally change the look of a single tangle or even of a whole tile. This is a very important thing to aknowledge, I’d go as far as to say that shading is at least as important as tangling. I’m not joking here! I think every tangler has experienced this before that you tangled a tile and you not quite liked it a lot – something was kind of.. “missing2 or wobbly or… something else that disturbs you but on which you cannot put your finger at. But once you shaded the whole thing, the picture has a whole different look and even feel to it. Only because you shaded the tangles. And even if you were happy with your drawing before tangling, you usually will be amazed at how shading can give your drawing the perfect final touch.

New tangles for day 4 were Jonqual, Nipa and Shattuck. I was really happy to finally get another tangle with some darker values to use. The reason for this, as you can read in my post on day 3, is that I kind of have the problem with the tangles up to now that the tonal value is too similar resulting in a big greyish mass without any “attractions”. So I was hoping that Jonqual would help me here. Let’s see what happened:

Tangles used: Fescu, Festune, Jonqual, Knightsbridge, Nipa, Pokeroot, Shattuck, Tipple

Well.. I think I partially succeeded here. I like the different look of Jonqual (edgy) and Knightsbridge (roundish) here, which is a result from shading it. Before shading, they looked very similar, but now I think the difference is very obvious. Festune and its shading is another thing I like on this tile. What I’m not so thrilled about is how the strong contrast (Jonqual and Knightsbridge) stand kind of… isolated again compared to the rest of the tile. That’s also a reason why I decided against shading the “waves” of Nipa, it would only result in another greyish mass again.. I think I already got a little bit better at combining and transferring from one tangle to another (Fescu + Nipa or Jonqual + Knightsbridge here), but it isn’t enough just yet to create a harmonic tile all over (achieving that on day 3 was pure chance I guess XD). But I’ll be working on that!