Precious Pendrills

Rick and Maria over at zentangle.com released a new pattern this week called Pendrills. So, naturally, that's our theme this week in the Diva's challenge. :)

I also got a new book this week, Time to Tangle with Color by Maria Browning. And furthermore was inspired by some recent ATCs that Margaret posted at Enthusiastic Artist. And, Sandra at Life Imitates Doodles keeps posting her experiments in watercolor.

Between the three, I decided to try my hand at the various watercolor pencil background techniques. I used my favorite method to color the background of a 3" square for the Pendrills challenge.



This was done on bristol smooth. The background was painted using a water brush that I ran over the pigment of fuscia and teal blue derwint inktense watercolor pencils then painted on the paper. No, this wasn't watercolor paper. Yes, it did work. Yes, it did pull (melt? Wash?) away some of the smooth surface of the paper. I taped the square down to my drawing board using artists tape, and then let it dry, and tried not to soak the paper with the brush. It was very slightly warped when it was dry, but by the time I finished drawing the tangles with the micron pen, it had pretty much flattened back out again.

Also of note was how different it was to draw with the pens on the bristol smooth after it had a layer of watercolor pigment on it and had been wet. It definitely changed the grain of the paper, but it worked rather well I thought for this particular piece, and it wasn't objectionable at all to me to draw on.

When the tangles were done, I shaded just the "azalea" of the foreground, then added highlights with my sakura glaze pens and used the fuscia again to enhance the color in the petals of the flowers.