Opus #2

Over the past couple weeks I have posted bits and pieces of this artwork on facebook and instagram with the promise of a blog post to follow. Well, here it is.

Zentangle recently came out with some new tiles they call the Opus. It is a 10.5" square tile of 100% cotton, fine artists paper. I enjoyed drawing on the larger tile, but won't be carrying them in my store for two reasons:

1. At $22.00 for five tiles, I don't feel they are cost effective, and
2. I haven't figured out any easy way to ship them, while keeping the shipping cost low, and have them packaged safely to prevent bends and creases. 

However, I did purchase some to play with. I posted the first Opus tile I made here. Well, shoot. Apparently I haven't blogged that yet. Well, here it is anyway. Shoot! I can't even find a picture of it. I guess I'll have to blog that another time. I have too much going on in my life. I'd like to be bored for awhile.

Moving right along. The first Opus tile I did - the one I can't show you right now - was done with microns alone. For this second tile I wanted to see how the tile held up to wet media. I used my peerless watercolors and a water brush. In case you aren't familiar with peerless, they are sheets of paper with concentrated color on one side. You dip your water brush onto the paper and it picks up the color that you then paint with. So, ultimately not a lot of wet on your paper and they are easily portable.

While the color looks amazing - peerless are bright and wonderful - the tile itself didn't hold up all that well. I had a lot of pilling and abrasion on the paper, even though there wasn't a lot of water. I just kept filling in bits of color till the entire tile was covered.

When the tile was totally dry, I gently brushed as much of the pilling off with my fingertips as I could and . . . 

. . . began to tangle. I filled in large spaces of colors with a couple different tangles.

Then I went back in the open areas and started filling in with a new pattern called Arukas.

Interesting story. Arukas is easy and fun, but I was really concentrating hard filling in those areas. Making them carry over under tangles and connect on the other sides. I concentrated so hard that I had a blood vessel in my left eye hemorrhage and cause lots of pain and ugliness. At that point I decided to call this tile completed. Ta-da! Opus #2 done. 

My eye is better. All healed up now. It did look quite nasty for about a week. Still doing eye drops for it, but the white part of the eye is no longer the color of that hidden Mickey up there anymore. 

So there you go. Blogpost done and hitting 'publish.' Happy New Year, everyone!