A Space Odyssey

I hope you didn't miss me too much or worry that I'd fallen from this planet. I kind of took a necessary technology vacation, unplug for a good week. You ever do that?
Not that I was sitting still. There was the pool to open and the citrus need to be fed this time of year, time consuming projects both. No idle hands here! (And good therapy for my recovering hand).
So I didn't really get to the various design challenges, either. Time to refocus and get caught up to date!

I have some pretty pictures to share for the TwobyTwo. I've also been doing some much-needed organizing and found my daughter's baby blanket that my mom stitched for her. If you've been around, you know my daughter works, goes to school, has a serious boyfriend...you get the idea. It's been a long time since she's been a baby.

   
The second one is part of my receiving blanket. Yup, still got it, still in great shape. It can't be more than thirty years old, right?
You can stop laughing now.
I missed posting last week's EIM, button. I have a collection of vintage button cards on my nightstand, doesn't everybody? So here are some thirty-plus year old buttons:

This week's EIM is robot. If you're playing along with the galactic hitchhikers, the obvious choice is Marvin, but then there's Rosie from the Jetsons or B-9 from Lost in Space (you know? "Danger, Will Robinson!!"). I certainly can't go with something obvious, so while it's not really a robot, it is an intelligent non-human character:

Hal 9000
2001: A Space Odyssey

Two down, two to go...
The IAST this week played with flowers. It strayed into cartoony territory, but I like Zingers.

Say it with Flowers

Last weeks:

Cloud Nine

And the one before that. Since this also fits the Diva this week, I'm cheating and applying it there. (And yes, I used a pencil, so that's cheating, too!). I wasn't excited about it, but the woman next to me at the doctor's office waiting room thought this was an amazing design. The stippling kept me as busy as I needed to be for the waiting part.

The last one is last weeks Diva, bringing me up to date. I'll have to try these patterns again sometime. Like sometime I need to really sit still for a long while and focus. I don't think today is that kind of day. I might wander the weird wide web and see what the others are up to, though. I suggest you do, too! There is such an amazing amount of talent out there, and the ladies that come up with these challenges are quite devious, er, ah, dedicated.

Have a brilliant day, thanks for stopping by!

ECHO Echo echo.....

I'm kind of house-sitting in Anthem, la-dee-dah; my biggest job is to NOT kill the plants. I think I successfully pulled a couple gardenias through a few days of 102, fainting violets, indeed.
Otherwise, my job is to produce frosty recreational beverages (we call them FRBs for short. It's our survival mechanism for surviving triple digits ourselves) served out on the patio and watch the sunset.
Such trauma.
In between, I'm trying to make sure my little farmette survives the heat, too. I thought how could I possibly have time to be creative? I'm hardly sitting still. Doing a lot of driving around. Here I am thinking I've been slacking.
And yet...!
For your enjoyment, I've a surprising bunch of stuff here. It's kind of all over the map, so I'll start with the work I did for my own challenge blog, the TwobyTwobyTuesday.
The word for the week is, "Echo."
First, the portraits. I had to hunt far and wide to find a picture of a face in a magazine that would work for this. In the concept of "Echoism," a person who has a more symmetrical face is considered more appealing. Split the face down the middle and create mirror images of each half. It's an exercise I remember doing in sixth-grade art class (I was ten.).

Myrna Dow
Winner, PPFA Contest
And unwitting portrait
Participant

Sigh, I'm not ten anymore. I think I did a better job back in grade school. It was hard working on such a teenie scale.

If you visited last time, I put in a teaser for my other answer. This is that project in its entirety:

I took the tangle "Echoism" across the entire page in my journal, created six two-inch tiles, mixed them up, drew each one, then put them all back together again. That was more fun.

While I was at it, I did a more traditional piece, same method, just one pattern:

In my garden, I've been nursing an amaryllis bulb for two and a half years. You know, the ones you pick up at Christmas and force to bring bright colours into your home in the dead of winter? Well, normally, they are quite happy in desert surrounds, so armed with that knowledge, I planted the bulb out in the garden after it bloomed. That was winter, 2014. This is now.
Isn't she pretty?

Which inspired:

I took a photograph of the string and I give it to you all for your drawing pleasure. You will find it under a new page titled, "G2H." You'll see.

Now, onto some challenges.
Last week's IAST was to honor Mom. Adele started us out with a big "M" and the instructions to fill it in. These are supposed to be "Hollyhocks." Hmm.

This is my doodling for the EIM, the word being "Three-Dimensional." I'm a "flat art" artist, always working two-dimensionally. I picked a variety of ideas for creating the LOOK of that third dimension.

I couldn't wait to give the new-to-me tangle, "3-D Room" by Dami Tang a workout and I took my chance on the Diva this week, where I gave it a more controlled grid to fill:

The call was to use more black. I used a LOT of black last week. All I wanted to get out of this week was high contrast; didn't want to over kill it. It's interesting.

I think that brings me up to date. Be sure to check out the various pages across the weird wide web, I'm sure you will find inspirations in abundance.
Have a brilliant day! c

Trying to Relax

After the week I had last, I need some major decompression. I'm continuing my pursuit of zinchies and have done a couple extra already this week. Focusing on an inch at a time is a very mindful and relaxing method to regain my composure. It helps considering I'm looking at the wall where there used to be cabinets and currently are none. It's slow going. Sigh.

LG is, of course, to help honor St. Valentine's Day. (Adele Bruno's story about her pattern is very sweet. When I think LG, I think washer and dryer. Ms. Bruno thinks of her husband). I like hearts and flowers, but right now discussions on flooring and paint samples, floor plans and the like are as romantical as it gets (with a nod to Popeye and Olive Oyl). Oh, baby, baby!
BTW, if you tuned in last time, I was looking for a star pattern and I found "Bales" fits the bill, in an inside-out kind of way.

Onomato Pea Yeah!

This week has been one long, strange stream of consciousness. It's hard to jump in and find where it all started, but see if you can follow some of my reasoning.
I started the weekend working on Paizel. it's kind of a paisley pattern on Day 31 of my imprisonment...er, ah, of "One Zentangle a Day." I keep trying to get through that book! It is a fabulous reference on zentangly things, but I'd be broke if I tried all the different media. Thus, I'm trying to stick to the methods, not the materials. This is a square using "paizel:"

On one of the other days, the direction was to mix up the strings a little bit to bring fresh air to my style. I woke up that day telling myself that I hadn't used "Hollibaugh" in a while (ever have days like that?!), so I knew that was a prerequisite for that day's tangling. So I scribbled a string that had straight lines, sharp angles as well as curves and drew in the "hollibaugh" on some of the string lines. This is what I accomplished on Sunday:

I carried over the B'tweed from last week and got a very art deco feel for this one. I like how the "Onomato" gives the piece contrast and movement. I looked at it and thought that part looks like peas-in-a-pod, and then it hit me: onomato-pea-yah...ononmatopoeia. It was like I figured out a joke someone told me months ago and I finally got the punch line. [And THAT lent itself to my twinchie for "fire" as a VERB on yesterday's post]
Then I woke up Monday morning to the Diva Challenge for the week with guest artist Cris Letourneau. Her illustration of her tangle "Seton" had lots of onomato in peapods. (Another book I'm using for Zentangle, #9 by Suzanne McNeill has other patterns quite similar to Seton--Poin and Quartered). I immediately saw the pattern as a string (gotta bring some fresh air to my style!) and wanted a very high-contrast result. Since onomato gave me a lot of contrast, I was going for more.

That's how my teenie art brain traveled through the past week. WOW! What a ride! Now to get back to my regularly scheduled life. But before I do, I'll be checking out some of the great artwork in response to this week's Diva Challenge. You should too!

Stripes, this time with Sparkle!

I see a pattern here! Over at "It's a String Thing," the call is for more stripes. This time we have a swirly string from Sue Agnew, 055 for week 55 and a monotangle (use just the one pattern) of stripes and apply sparkle liberally. I have been playing with stripes as that was a recent lesson in "One Zentangle a Day," so I have SOME experience under my belt. However, my experience with sparkle...well, suffice to say I shy away from it as it kind of needs some serious planning. Especially in this case, with only the one pattern.

I explored various line widths (which is unusual for me) and assorted stripe patterns.The sparkle was preplanned and set in universal light (all coming from the same direction). I liked being able to focus on one tangle and going for a bold lighting effect. I think the stripes could have used more curves to establish form, but for such a teenie canvas, this is all right. To compensate, I did more shading than my usual work to build depth.

Yikes, Stripes!

The Diva Challenge (#182) for the week was to incorporate Stripes into the art. I had already wanted to tackle the It's a String Thing's Challenge that utilized a diagonal line pattern from Linda Farmer (#51, pattern 051) and only tangle patterns starting with "fa-."
But first things first.
I'm amused that everyone is talking about "back to school," soon when the students of the Big City started July 30. I know it's an anomoly, but the lucky students had three weeks in when our little hamlet got thrashed with flooding. Four inches of rain in fewer hours for the second time in a week. The local elementary school was turned into a Red Cross emergency evacuation facility last Tuesday, which was the basis for my first set of stripes. I was lucky that I didn't have to take them up on their services.

I think my neighbors thought I was some uppity yuppy who would be a total wuss under pressure, so I named that one, "Earning Stripes." I had to prove my street cred and boy! There's the stripes, the rain and lightning, the freeway, the waves of water and turbulence from the flooding. And a heart, as I live in the "heart" of Arizona.
The other is my answer, quite belatedly, to the other challenge. There is Fandango by Vicky Bassett and Fassett by Lynn Mead, Fantails by Neil Burley and Facets by Nancy Pinke plus Fafolia with unknown origin. I found that and some other interesting patterns at mentalfluff.com. I'll be humming the Talking Heads all day: "Fafafafafafa..."
Thanks to all those tangly people that helped keep me focused today. Check out the various websites to see what others have done with the tasks at hand.