MCC All About Zentangle - Wk 3

Links: MCC (My Creative Classroom), Marie Browning

I have quite a few projects from the third week of the course when Marie introduced various ways of adding colour to tangles. Since there are too many to post at once I thought I’d post my final piece of artwork for that week first. It was actually supposed to be a Zentangle Inspired scrapbook page – I adapted the exercise somewhat & started by drawing & colouring the butterfly as my focal image & then constructed the rest around it – much the same as if I’d used a photograph for the focal image.

This has taken the best part of a week to draw, colour & assemble with plenty of learning experiences along the way as I’m not a person who can draw by instinct/naturally. 

Prior to this course I’ve not used Tombow pens & I discovered as I was initially trying to work on my favourite Winsor & Newton Cotman 190gsm Cold Pressed/NOT Grain Fin watercolour paper that the Tombows refuse to blend out smoothly when direct to paper watercolouring - a very visible hard line remains. On an earlier exercise where I’d not been shaping elements I’d used the more robust Daler-Rowney Langton 300gsm Hot Pressed Extra Smooth watercolour paper without the hard lines so I had to conclude that the different watercolour papers were having an impact upon the blendability.

The thick hot pressed paper doesn’t really respond very well to a ball tool for shaping but I eventually managed to shape my butterfly & petals without creasing by gently rounding them over several sizes of glue bottles & pencils.

angled view showing dimension of flower & butterfly

close-up showing detail & glittering of butterfly 

close-up showing lettering, bee & caterpillar

The project was drawn by hand using Sakura Pigma Micron Pens 01 & 05 onto a 9¾ x 7 inches piece of the Langton hot pressed watercolour paper & watercoloured with the Tombow markers using the direct to paper method. The butterfly’s body has been glittered using Stickles glitter glue & shaped as above.