Joey's Weekly Challenge #19: optical illusion monotangle

Over at Made by Joey this week's challenge involves using "a monotangle of your favourite tangle that generates an 'optical illusion'".  I first misread this and did a duotangle of beeline and cubine, but then redid the challenge using only paradox, although I did put paradox in a square as well as a triangle.  Does that make it a different tangle?  I like the effect, but think the shading could have more originality.

 

I am the Diva challenge #178: Duotangle by the letter.

This week's challenge at I am the Diva involves using two tangles based on your initials.  My internet initials are KR for Kia Richardson.  I made two different tangles and couldn't decide between them so I decided to post them both.

The first one uses Knightsbridge and Roids.

 

 

In the second tangle I used the patterns Kukes and Reticulated.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hope you enjoy them!  Still can't decide which one I like.

 

 



 



 

Every Inchie Monday: Orange

Knock  knock

Who's there?

Banana

Banana who?

Knock knock

Who's there?

Banana

Banana who?

Knock knock

Who's there?

Banana

Banana who?

Knock knock

Who's there

Orange

Orange who?

Orange you glad I didn't say banana?


What a silly old joke.  I don't like the colour orange, so this is what I though of when orange came up for this week's word at Every Inchie Monday.  I confess to swiping the picture from Google, although I couldn't fit three bananas into the inch, so I just did one times 3 (x3). 

 

So on to this week's catch up inchies.  Hope you're not getting tired of them.  I'm having a blast.

Implausible:  Like a lot of other people, I first thought of  'when pigs fly', so I did that one, but being a feminist (no it's not a dirty word - it only means you think women are equal) from the 60's & 70's, I also thought of the phrase 'a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle'.  Here they are:             Indigo:  There's two pictures of this one so you can see both sides of the pretty bead,  which I bought in Toronto's Chinatown years ago.  A true beader never throws anything away or has too many beads.                     Jet:  My first reaction was to want to include a picture of the Jets from West Side Story, but using a photograph, no matter how much I had to fiddle with it to get it one inch square, seemed like cheating, and I couldn't draw it, so I drew a happy little jet too.           Jolly-boat:   I knew that a jolly boat was a small boat attached to a bigger ship, but I had to look it up to see what one looked like.  I included a jolly roger flag too and tried to make the boat look happy.           That's all for now folks  I'm nearly caught up!

Tackle it Tuesday - letter T

Here is my entry for Tackle it Tuesday by Artful Creations ., the letter "T".    I've used the tangles Tat (which is from the book "One Zentangle a Day"), Tringle, Telis (perhaps my current favourite tangle) and Tri-Me.  Not one of my all time favourite tiles, but sometimes you just have to go with what you have. 

Joey's Weekly Tangle Challenge #18: Use a found object as your string.

This week Joey, from Made by Joey , wants us to "trace around an object in your home to create your string."   Well yesterday I was cleaning out my basement and came across this key.  Haven't a clue what it's for, but it certainly is pretty.

I couldn't really trace around it because it is rather small and three dimensional, so I drew it in various sizes instead.

 

 

 

Diva Challenge #177: Truffle

This week's guest challenger, Caroline Broady,  at I am the Diva , challenge #177,  asks us to use her new tangle called Truffle.  It is a lovely flower-like swirly line pattern.  It seemed to need other flowing organic patterns to go with it.  My tangle ended up reminded me of an undersea world, although it is a bit abstract for that.  Perhaps it is the use of Angel Fish that makes me think so.  Once again the scanner seems to have washed out the shading, but when I darkened the shading, it seemed too dark. I'm working on finding a happy medium.  Here it is.  Enjoy.

Every Inchie Monday: Odd

This week's word at Every Inchie Monday is odd,  I really wanted to use my mum's old expression Odds and Sods, to mean a conglomeration of various things, but couldn't figure out exactly how to portray it.  (And sod is not a nice word in England where she came from.)

 So I went for two more ordinary ideas:  odd numbers - they are sparkly letter stickers,  and odd balls  -- those red, blue and white balls are the ones we treasured as children (medium Inktense pencils).

Now for my weekly catch up!  I left off with engrave, so the next one is

Forest:  I thought of drawing the box of chocolates from Forest Gump, but thought that was too much like chocolate so I got kind of ordinary here and just drew a little forest of trees (can you hear one fall?)  I tried to get a little bunny in there but it was just too small.  Medium:  Prismacolour  coloured pencils. 

Figure:  I spent many years figure skating as a child.  True iconic Canadian, I grew up with an ice pond in my backyard and a front yard that froze over every year.  I learned to skate as I learned to walk..  I belonged to two clubs at the same time but when it came time for private lessons, to my regret it simply wasn't in the budget. Medium: Prismacolour coloued pencils and silver gelly pen.

Game:  I always wanted to own Boardwalk when playing Monopoly as a child, mostly because I liked to colour of the tile I think.  It didn't often end up with me winning, that's for sure.  Medium: coloured cardstock, Inktense pencils.

 

 

 

Gold:  I seem to like doing the colours when they come up.  Here is used a gold button and some sparkly scrapbook paper.  The hardest part, as usual, was taking a picture of it so the shine came through. 

 

 

Head:  I got very ordinary here again and tried to draw a head in a one inch square,   My vanity wants to assure you I  can draw heads more or less properly, if given enough room!   Then I decided to use another idea from the 4H club, which stands for Head. Heart, Hands and Health.  It's a sort of country-wide agricultural club.  I joined because  I wanted to have a horse, even though we couldn't afford it. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hot:  I love hot air balloons, although I don't think you'd ever get me up in one!  They are so beautiful as they float across the sky.  Medium:  gelly pens, brown pigma micron, Prismacolors.

 

 

That's enough for this week.  More to come.

 



Tackle it Tuesday: letter S

This week's letter at Artful Creations Tackle it Tuesday is S.  There are many, many tangles for the letter S.  I chose four:  Shiraz, Scrolled Feathers, Sanibelle and Swurli.  I enjoyed doing this one as I work my way towards tangles that are more organic and less boxy.  Hope you like it.

Diva's challenge 176: B.Y.O.B.

This week's guest challenger  at I Am The Diva has asked us to B.Y.O.B. - Bring Your Own Beverage.  I drink neither tea, nor coffee, nor at the point in m life, wine.  My beverage of choice is Coca-Cola.  Well.  I don't advise using Coke as the basis for a tangle.  No matter how long you let it dry, it remains sticky and really mucks up you pens.  So, I thought, what to do?  Then the bell rang.  I have a coffee-fiend of a friend for whom I bought a coffee maker and coffee for when he comes a-visiting.  There it was in the freezer - coffee.  Now I wasn't about to find the coffee maker buried somewhere in the back of a cupboard, so I put water on watercolour paper (sketching paper which I usually use was another problem) and sprinkled coffee over it.  It worked beautifully. 

Now my problem was I kept seeing figures in the splotches and with these in mind it was hard to get away from the true Zen of tangling.  I'm also not very good yet at thinking outside that box.  So here is what I came up with.

The first one didn't get his picture taken before I started tangling because I couldn't help but see a dinosaur and obligingly tangled him some primeval plants.

 

 

 

My imagination got the best of me again and my second try turned out to be a frog playing hockey (I do live in Canada, after all).  Can anyone else see it?  He's got his back leg up off the ice as he takes a step forward.  Or it could be a cat.  Ok, it's just weird.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 There's a third one, but it looks like a person stretched out on the ground complete with shadow, so I quit!

 

I learned a lot from this challenge and I'm glad I didn't give up, which I nearly did.  I usually post much earlier in the week than this.  Hope you like them.

 

 

 



Joey's Weekly Tangle Challenge #17: tree

This week's challenge at madebyjoey is to tangle a tree.  This is one of my favourite things to do when I really want to relax.  I like to make little scenes with flowers and mushrooms and trees (somewhat influenced by things I have seen on Pinterest and the web).   My trees always have a fairy door for the wee folk at the bottom of the garden.  I try not to use the same tangle twice.  So this one was a pleasure to do.  I could have submitted one of the 15 or so others I have similar to this one, but I wanted to start from scratch.

Catching Up on Inchies

Having joined the Every Inchie Monday group on June 23 with the word Maid, suddenly I became addicted to these tiny gems of art.  So I decided to go back and catch up with those that I had missed for 2014,  I left off last week with Cathedral so here are the next few.   I hope no one minds if I add these to this weeks Inchie link as I forgot to do so when I entered Navy this week, as I was on my way to a specialist appointment and didn't want to be late.  If it isn't please delete this post.

Chocolate:  Mmmm chocolate.  I had to go with my favourite chocolate bar Caramilk.  I came up with several different versions, trying to get the gold shine into the picture,  I had to hyphenate the name in order to get it to fit on the bar itself.

 

 

Dual:  The best dual I could think of was yin/yang. 

 

 

 

 

Dark:  I love Snoopy writing his novel.  He always begins with "It was a dark and stormy night."  Did you know there are entire books composed with people writing little blurbs all beginning with this phrase?  I have one and it is hilarious. 

 

 

 

 

Explode:  I got a little bit serious with this one and portrayed that which we are all afraid of: nuclear explosion.



 

 

 

 

 

Engrave:  And one more so as not to leave it on a negative note.  Engrave is defined as "To carve, cut, or etch into a material".   I chose to use a hand carved stamp on an Inktense background.  It's only part of a leaf stamp because the whole stamp was too big for the inchie.  (I'm really in love with my new Inktense pencils - 72 colours - yummy.)

 

 

 

 

Thanks for looking at my inchies.  They are so much fun.  More to come!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



Every Inchie Monday: Navy

The word this week at Every Inchie Monday is Navy.  I decided to go with the colour this time.  On top of navy cross stitch I've added a button, ribbon and a few beads from my rather extensive collection.  I really enjoyed making this inchie.  It was quite a change from drawing.   It was also rather hard to photograph in order to get the texture and the shine of the beads.  Finally I had to do it without the flash.

Joey's weekly Challenge #16: Tangle a Border

Made by Joey 's weekly challenge #16 involves tangling a border.  I've used the tangle Beetle Joos, which I adore because you can do so much with it.  In the middle is my sweet, quintessentially curious kitty cat, Kaliko.

Artful Creations Tackle it Tuesdays: letter 'R'

Artful Creations Tackle it Tuesday is all about the letter 'R' this week.  I really enjoyed making this tangle.  I used the tangles Roids, Reticulated and Riveting.  To me it kind of feels like the Roids are being popped out of the Riveting.

Diva Challenge 175: Use My Tangle (UMT), Crux

Last week for The Diva's Challenge I tangled four patterns very similar to Crux, seen here .  So this week, I wanted to do something quite different from that rather boxy tangle..  These days I'm working on making my tangles more organic and less square.  Here is what I came up with.

Every Inchie Monday: Negative and some others

This week's theme at Every Inchie Monday is Negative.  Not wanting to be depressing, I chose to express the art design element of positive and negative. I've always been fascinated by this drawing, because if you look at it one way, you see a vase; if you look at it another way, you see to mirror image faces.  Enjoy.

 

 

I'm finding these inchies so addictive that I've decided to go back to the beginning of the year and try to catch up on the inchies I've missed.  Here are the first few.

 

 

Alice Blue:  I had decided what I wanted to do for this subject before I looked at everyone else's.  Really I did.  However, when I did check, my inchie is very similar to Wendy's here , for which I apologize, although hers is more creative in that she drew Alice's door and I just coloured in Tenniel's picture of Alice with her "Drink Me" bottle that shrinks her to inchie size.   I kept it because I am doing this mostly for me, and this is what I wanted to do.  Again, apologies to Wendy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Amulet:  This one is an Asian token meaning Enlightenment that seemed appropriate to use as an amulet.  The purple background is handmade paper shot through with gold.

 

 

 



 

 

 Brown:  For Brown, I used my brand new Water Mixable Oil paints.  I combined the three primary colours red, blue and yellow to get brown, in the middle.

 

 

 

 

 

Ballet:  I have some fabulous scrapbook paper designed around my favourite ballet: The Nutcracker Suite.  The first one is a ballet slipper, and the second one is a tiny mouse king.  You can even see his crown!  The background paper is musical notes.

 

 

 

 

 

Cathedral:  I decided to use a square of the quilt pattern cathedral windows. I once made a pincushion using this pattern and it is very difficult, at least for me!

 

 





 

 

More to come!

 

 



Tackle it Tuesday: Letter Q

At Artful Creations this weeks Tackle it Tuesday letter is Q.  That means you must create a tangle using only patterns that begin with the letter Q.  I made 2 tiles, one very traditional and one not so much.


For the first tile I used the tangles Quanxi, Quandry and Quilt:

  For the second one, I began with Quib and weaved Quandry, Quare and Qian-long into it.

It's a String Thing #47

Over at Tickled to Tangle Adele Bruno has designed a string to celebrate the American Fourth of July holiday.  She wants us to use tangles that begin with the letters J U L Y.  Well, I managed a short form - JLY: Joy, which took a lot of practice and I'm still not sure I'm doing correctly, Linked and Suzanne McNeill's version of Yincut.  I really like Laced and I'm working on letting the white space speak for itself.

Joey's WeeklyTangle Challenge 15: Your Flag

Happy Canada Day everyone!  In honour of the occasion Joey's Weekly Challenge #15 is to tangle your country's flag.  This was a lovely challenge to do on this special day.  It will be interesting to see how many countries are represented.

In keeping with the festive mood, I first chose the tangle Parteh, and then added Zin and Ze Scen.  I wanted to keep it simple so as not to obscure the Maple Leaf. 

Diva Challenge 174: Two Strings

This week's challenge from I Am The Diva involves using two different strings at the same time.  I tried really hard to use two official strings, but putting them together just seemed to result in a complicated mess.  I'm sure others had more success than I did.

So I decided to use two very simple strings that I made up and then put them together.  A bit too simple perhaps, but the best I could do.  Here are the strings:

 

 

 

When choosing my tangles, I did something I've always wanted to try.  I used four tangles based on the same basic pattern - the sort of flower-like form that results when you put rice shapes together with ends together  (it's easier to see than explain).  Three of these have names:  da Deal, Spokes and 4 Corners.  The fourth, on the right side, may have a name, but I don't know what it is.  It's basically just adding emphasis to one side of rice shape in order to balance the amount of dark area.

 

 

Hope you like it.