Challenge 34, part two

After another trip to Texas Art Supply (dangerous store!) and more Tombows (love these markers, even if they aren't archival), I decided to do the other half of this week's challenge. As a reminder, the challenge was to either fill a curved string with straight line tangles as I did on the first piece, or fill a straight line string with curvy tangles.

This time, I went the color route.

I used a neat geometric design I found on Sandra Strait / Molossus' blog, put a border around it, then went with some delicate patterns to give the Tombow colors just a little texture.

I also decided to experiment with the tombows on those vellum ATCs that I had set aside. I didn't like them for my pattern cards as much as the bristol smooth, but they're perfectly fine for actually working on. As expected, it took the pen better than the watercolor ATCs do, the markers weren't as easy to blend, but overall it worked out. At least, I think so.



It probably would pop even more if I tried some graphite to shade, but I think the paper's had about as much as it'll take.

Lines are done in either micron pigma or triplus fineliner. Anything fill is done in Tombow. Very little was colored straight on the ATC. Most of the coloring was done by loading the blender brush with a color and letting it fade naturally.

For those curious about color choices, I used 055 and 062 for the yellows, 885 for the red, 245 and 173 for the greens, 452 and 493 for the blues, and 947 for the brown.

But this ATC resulted in not one, but two 'products'. Or, perhaps I should say, one and a half. Or maybe even two and a half, if you consider a color test piece to be a product.

I know sometimes it's very handy to see another person's sketch book, even if it's for nothing but color samples. So, here's the ATC I used for testing. I wanted the material to be the same as the finished piece since I hadn't done much with the combination of media.



And the "half"? That would be my brush-cleaning ATC. Something my mom mentioned about some interesting designs she's gotten just on the scrap she used to clean her brush made me decide to use yet another ATC to clean the blender brush on. And, sometimes, the full color brushes when I was testing out the colors and trying to decide whether to go full saturation or with a loaded blender brush.

When my actual piece was done, I spritzed the blender scrap and now have another colored background to tangle on.