Today’s tile took me on an unexpected adventure.
I started with a simple idea – what if I used N’Zeppel for a string and filled it with a fragment like Crescent Moon? Couldn’t be easier, right?
As I tangled I decided to make my N’Zeppel spaces pretty big, and to blacken the interstices (the bits in between). It seemed only logical to blacken around the edges as well, so that the N’Zeppel spaces would stand out.
Then the fun started.
As I drew my Crescent Moons, a little voice told me to wait on blacking them out. The background is already black – I might want to do something different.
Then I started to like the negative space in some of the areas, places where I didn’t put the Crescent Moon auras all the way. When I decided to stop I still had a lot of white space. And I liked it just the way it was! I didn’t even want to shade it!
But I did want to try some ideas. So I scanned the tile in and made a couple of copies, then started to play.
In the first version, I used a navy PN pen to fill in the Crescent Moons, but it seemed too dark. So I tried lighter blue. I liked that better, but what about shading? So I tried three different shades of blue pastel pencil. I decided I liked the lighter blue for the Crescent Moons, and the darker, almost Navy blue for the shading.
Hmmm. So what if I used a different color altogether? Enter the orange Micron – oooh I like that!
For shading, I didn’t want it all orange, so I tried orange/yellow/orange around the aura areas, and yellow in the negative spaces.
So today, I’m going with that color combination. But guess what? I kept the original tile white – room for more experimentation.
So when in doubt, I highly recommend scanning in your tile and then trying all kinds of things. Who knows what you’ll come up with?
A Tangling Life 