Once Upon a Phicops Mickey

Another tangle from Walt Disney World.

Once upon a time, a little girl made her first visit

to the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World.

The little girl jumped and skipped her way through the park,

stopping here and there to ooh and ahhhh.

Characters were cool and required photos and autographs.

Attractions were awesome but required long waits in line,

in the sweltering heat,

and let's face it - not all of them appealed to the little girl.

Then she rounded a corner and came upon the Mad Hatter's Tea Party.

A swirling, whirling dervish of happiness in the 

form of crazy tea cups.

Overseen by a little mouse that popped out of the tea pot

as the little girl whirled and spun and spun like crazy.

Spinning as fast as her little arms could turn the wheel. 

And a tradition was born.

(Borrowed from a Google search.) As I sat in my hotel room to draw, I thought about that little girl. Missing her immensely as she nows lives out west, making awesome pastries, cakes, and pies for a living. I thought about her favorite ride and knew I wanted to draw it next. Phicops immediately came to mind. Phicops made an awesome representation of tea cups. Add a little Mickey and it's all good.
Now if that little girl would just come for a visit, I would totally take her to Orlando to visit the Mad Hatter's Tea Party once again.

Phicops

Lately I have been playing with primarily one pattern at a time. Right now it's phicops. There are so many ways to adapt this tangle. Here it reminds me a lot of dragonair. Or flower pots. Hehehehe!

Thinking of the Beach

I am back home and trying to get back in the swing of posting on a regular basis. I have good intentions, but life keeps interrupting my progress. Some of the Facebook tangle artists are having a tile swap, so that's what I've been working on. I like the spirals, this time I tried something a little different and built a spiral completely from the tangle phicops. Fun. 
It's been incredibly hot here at home, although not so much today. Rain, rain, and more rain is what is in our forecast today. In the back of my mind though - the beach is calling. I'm thinking Cedar Key, a swimming pool, some pelicans in flight and diving, my camera, some crab bisque, and a little sun. Hmmmmm. Soon? Linking this post up to The Artist's Play Room, weekly post with Jenn McLean. Head on over and check out art from various artists and art styles :).

It's a Fanta-Sea World

Wow! It's really hard to blogpost from the iPad. This type looks huge. If it seems like I'm screaming at you - - - sorry. I don't mean to. 
I finally finished the underwater drawing we started in Melbourne, in Meredith Yuhas' class. Twinkling H2Os, some sea salt, microns, graphite, white charcoal, and a gelly roll pen. That's all it took to make this beautiful, underwater fantasy world. So much fun! 

Monochromatic, APR #64

The Artist's Play Room challenge this week was monochromatics. Any color - our choice - in variations from light to dark. This is what I made today.

I haven't done a tutorial in awhile, so here are the steps I followed to make my monochromatic offering this week. I started out with a sheet of 9" x 12" Strathmore Bristol smooth surface, 100 lb. paper. I also used Dylusions Ink Sprays in Funky Fuchsia, Bubblegum Pink, and a mix of White Linen with 8 drops of Bubblegum Pink. 

To get started, I took a Ranger spritz water bottle and misted the paper lightly.

While the water was still damp, I spritzed the three colors of ink spray onto various sections of the paper. To get the feathered effect I got with the pink section to the right, I held my ink spray bottle to the side of the paper and spritzed it across the paper instead of straight on to the paper. As the ink hit the page, it feathered and spread in the water. 

Let the ink sit in the water for 10-15 seconds, and you will notice the colors start to blend and spread. 

You can keep adding color as you need to. If you have white spaces that could use a little help, spritz more water onto those white areas and watch the colors start to spread even more.

If you get too much water buildup, roll a section of paper towels back and forth across your page. This will blot up excess water and color. It may also lay down some awesome texture, depending on what your paper towels look it.

Here is a closeup of some of the details.

Keep working the water, ink, and paper towels until you get the effect you want.

More detail. If you want to hurry up the drying process, feel free to use a heat gun.

Wanting to incorporate other elements into my monochromatic theme, I used some stencils from Joggles.com, a couple daubers, and some Memento ink pads. I placed the stencil where I wanted it to be on my layout, held it in place with my hand, and then dabbed stamp pad ink (rose bud) onto the stencil flowers.

I wanted my flowers to have some depth, so I used a wild plum Memento ink pad and a smaller dauber, dabbing darker ink around the lower portions of the petals. I used another Joggles stencil to make the sun.

Once I got my inks the way I wanted them, I heat set them with a heat gun. I don't know that this is absolutely necessary, but I am used to doing it.

Next I used this cool little supply that came in the mail last week. Punchanella, I got it from the Paper Studio. It is the remnant leftovers from sequins. Pretty awesome! I laid it in place across a lower corner and used the wild plum ink to dab some wonderful dots across my page.

I love the way it looks! And it is so easy to do!

This is what I had up to this point.

I also used a stamp at the lower left corner to add a sentiment. Adding linework was a lot of fun! Patterns I used included: grass border, tidal, leau, printemps, phicops, mooka, fescu, and dandelions. I added a few butterflies via stamps and was done. I love the bright colors! This was so easy, anyone could make it. You don't have to use the ink sprays if you don't already own them. (Although, if you ever try them you won't want to use any other ink.) Ranger color wash sprays would work and most Michael's carry them. You could do something similar with watercolors also. 
If you have a minute, head on over to Jenn McLean's page Just Add Water, Silly and check out everyone's artwork for this week's challenge. You could even add some of your own!

Mandala Practice

This post is going to have lots of photos, walking you through how I made the above mandala.

I am taking an online class with Marie Browning and one of this past week's assignments was to make a mandala and color it with Irojiten pencils. I was in Maryland, 800 miles away from home, and didn't have my normal supplies with me. As I was walking around a fabric store, I came across these quilting templates hanging on a rack.

It dawned on me that these templates would make pretty good mandala templates. I started pulling them off the rack and layering them on top of each other, trying to see what would match up together and look like a mandala. I ended up buying four templates and used these two for this project.

I placed one quilt template onto my paper and used a micron 01 to trace within the lines. Then I played with the second template, moving it around until it lined up in a pleasing format. Then I traced those lines. I didn't use all the lines, on both templates, just the ones that looked like they went together.

Next I started filling in lines, connecting paths that seemed to go together. A flower started appearing, so I added some small leaves and started outlining some larger ones.

A few more lines made those larger leaves start standing out more dramatically.

I filled in some seed pods with some purk, finished the larger leaves, then used the tangle phicops to start turning the rest of the design into flower petals. A little fescu soon became stamen.

Once I got my flower mandala looking the way I wanted it to, I used my Japanese irojiten coloring pencils from Tombow to start laying in some color.

These are some pretty incredible pencils. Not watercolor pencils, just coloring pencils. The shading and color variation comes from dropping in layer after layer of color.

I think this was the second time I used these pencils, so I still have a way to go with them before I feel competent.

I used five different colors to lay down a technique called scrumbling around the outside. The scrumbling gives an almost drop-shadow kind of cast to the mandala.

All in all, I think I used 15 different pencils. Here is the finished product and I love the way it turned out! If I can do it - anyone can do it!

Love This Phicops!

This has been a great week for challenges! And I am miserably behind in  most of them, so I was really glad to see I could combine several with this one tile!

Linda Farmer at Tangle Patterns posts a new string each week for us to work with. This string was provided by Jadie Wright. I thought it looked like a water lily. You can read about Linda's string challenge here. 

Yesterday, Laura - at I Am the Diva - posted a new tangle that her husband B-rad designed. It's called Phicops and it was this week's Diva Challenge. So I combined the string challenge with the Diva Challenge and came up with my phicopped water lily.

I combined phicops with betweed, and threw in a little Derwent and there you go! You can check out all the phicops tiles here.

Jenn at Just Add Water, Silly gave us the APR challenge #39 for the word 'resolution.' She left the interpretation of the word up to us. As I considered my tile, and thought about the word 'resolution,' it reminded me of being open to ideas, open to new thoughts, open to new challenges, new ways of doing things, being open to other opinions, open to others' desires, wants, and wishes. Resolution is a means of being open - open like the petals on my water lily. An open heart, a heart reaching upwards. There are so many ways to interpret resolution. This one is mine. You can look at other interpretations of 'resolution' at Jenn's page - here.

And just like that - 3 challenges met for the week :).