Starting Fresh

Happy New Year!

I know that it is January 10, not January 1, but Alexa went back to school yesterday – driving herself for the first time. We had a bustling, crazy, wonderful break, including a few days in Disney World, a road-trip to Maine, a reunion of sorts with old friends, a meet-up with new friends, Phantom of the Opera, and much time with family and loved ones.

So, yesterday I spent the day worrying about Alexa driving all that way alone and already missing my partner in giggling. I did a lot of tangling to help with my nerves and sadness. Luckily, Laura is also back with another Diva Challenge. This one is a duo-tangle of phicops and bales. Both are lovely tangles, but I found it especially challenging to try to do something interesting with them.

For the first one, I decided to play with scale and make the phicops small, incorporating them into the huggins. I was going to title it: “how many ways can you draw phicops incorrectly?” or “spot the differences.” No matter how many times I draw that tangle, I have to look it up. And then if I am not carefully following the steps, something different comes out of my pen. Luckily, you don’t notice it so much with the huggins around it.

Just ink.

With some graphite shading.

Darkening some of the bands adds interest.

Not willing to leave well enough alone, I added some hatching to the other bands.

I don’t know if it is because I hadn’t tangled in a while, or if I was just feeling restless, but even though I thought I was done after the shading, a few hours later, I felt it needed black stripes. A few hours after that, I decided it still wasn’t done. And if this wasn’t a duo challenge, it is likely that there would be even more! It looks too much like fabric or carpet design.

Alexa and I are planning a trip down under after she finishes her spring semester. I think that is why I kept seeing the Sydney Opera House as I was tangling my phicops. (Either that, or I was drawing it wrong.) But, I decided to do a second version with the Phicops/Opera House as the focal point and tiny opera houses for the intersections of the huggins.

I don’t have a fine enough white pen or strong enough glasses to make the tiny phicops look like what I had envisioned!

Finally, I was still wondering if there was something else I could do to make this combination more interesting and different. So, here is the third challenge tile: supersized.

Tangling was such good therapy yesterday. I realized that other than tangling a leather coin purse for my mom, this is the first time I’ve picked up a pen in a month. It is good to be back.