Pushing the Limits

This week's Diva Challenge gave me a bit of pause for thought. Much as I love looking at Aquafleur, and I think it is a lovely tangle, it is one that I struggle with. So having it as the feature tangle for a tile? Well, I felt a bit of dread.

So what did I do? Did I just concentrate on Aquafleur and make what I could of it on a non-challenging white tile? Did I couple it with a comfortable or comforting tangle? Did I make my life easy? Hahahahaaha. No.

Renaissance tiles give me the heebies (which is weird, given I draw and paint on coloured grounds as a preference and love trois crayons), so I got out a Renaissance tile. In for a penny, in for a pound, perhaps.

Diva 322, Aquafleur, Molygon, Crescent Moon, Paisel

Surprisingly, the Aquafleurs worked okay. Still not quite right. I can't quite get my head around how this tangle flows, but they are, for once, on the right track. Crescent Moon and Paisel just seemed to work, so that was okay. So far, so good. But it took me another 45 minutes or so just staring at the tile or maniacally flicking through my tangle notebook before I finally decided what to do. Molygon. Another struggle tangle. That's two pennies in the pound now.

Actually, I'm really happy with the Molygon. I really like the way it turned out. But it and the Crescent section have very different things going on. I wonder if I should have just done one or the other. The Molygon makes the Aquafleur pop while the Crescent Moon sort of... I don't know... behaves differently but equally well. I think later I'll experiment, producing a tile that's just Aquafleur and Crescent Moon and another that's just Aquafleur and that particular version of Molygon, and see how they compare. That could be interesting. And it will make me practice those tangles a little more. Maybe I will find the flow. Can't hurt either way.

Overdid the shading a little. Knowing when to stop is also another challenge. So a challenging challenge this week. It's good to push ourselves.

Writ Large

No archived challenges today because I kind of went nuts on this week's Diva Challenge.

At the beginning of 2015 I had a lesson with Lianne Woods, the lovely CZT in the Sydney area. If you are on the east coast of Australia, it is worth looking her up and booking a lesson. Anyway, she was getting us to blow up tangles and use them as strings. We got the basics down on several tiles, but I didn't finish them in the time we had, put them in my box and sort of forgot about them. Last week I found them and finished them, keeping as much as possible to the style of tangling I had used at the time. Each one had some patterning already done. The Bb string tile had been closest to completion, I like the addition of the sepia pen and am glad that wavy bar was drawn through the middle. Sometimes you don't know what to do with an area, but it comes to you later. Then this week's challenge came and I realised that some of the tiles fitted the challenge parameters - to use stripes as strings. (There was a Jetties, which could have qualified too, as the stripes in the balls were tangled in. I might share that one another time.)

Even without the challenge I would have shared a couple of these, as I really like the idea of using tangles as strings. Thank you, Lianne!

Hazen string, Squid, Paisel, Msst, Tripoli

Bb string, Zander, Crescent Moon, Finery, Opus, Coaster, Shattuck, Nipa

W2 string, Onamato, Hibred, Finery, Shattuck, Meer, Purk, Akoya,
can anyone tell me what that last one is? I don't seem to have it in my journal.

And then, because I felt I should do an actual tile specifically for Diva day, there's this. Three very broad stripes. I am interested in how my style of tangling has shifted in the last two years, although that could just be because I need my glasses script updated. I suspect that seeing double when the tile is closer than arms' length is not a good thing (she types wryly).

Meer, Pearlz, Flux, Crescent Moon, Mooka, Fescu (doing a Sand Swirl thing again),
Nipa (without the circles)