This is my third attempt * at making a tangle inspired by a shamrock… I guess third times a charm. 🙂
* The first attempt, I totally messed up 2 one of the patterns in a leaf, then blacked it out. I then tried to create a new tangle over the black with a silver pen… but the overall design just didn’t sing for me. The second attempt, I messed up on the very last thing I drew (as in, it looked great up until the last few minutes), so I blacked out my mistake trying to make it blend, which it didn’t, so I tried to white-out the blackened area but that didn’t look good either. Finally this morning I drew a third attempt using only the black pen and the pencil (rather than the addition of the green brush/pen I had used on the previous two), and I tried to keep it light and free flowing (read: loosened hand) and a bit fill in with your mind kind of drawing. That’s not to say I didn’t make a mistake on this one, but I think it worked out much better.
Then I got the idea to ‘color’ it in GIMP 3, which worked out beautifully. First I painted and then healed the edges, then I used colorize in three different greens (on three different layers), I made one layer overlay to brighten that green, then the top layer multiply to darken that layer, and I came up with a green I liked… basically, my pencil shading and the texture of the paper were tinted green. What a neat experimental accident. 😛
Until next time…
~nic
P.S. For those interested in the first and second attempts…
2 In Zentangle… ‘there are no mistakes’… any slip ups you might make are supposed to be worked into the rest of the pattern. But my first attempt image the ‘slip up’ was a spacial mistake and I just didn’t like it and couldn’t make it blend.
3 GIMP is Open Source software that is available for all platforms (Linux, Mac, and Windows), it is a photo editor that does many (if not all) of the things you can do in Photoshop. You can download it for free here. The GIMP online manual can be found here.
Photography by Nic 
St Patty is??? Patrick? did you do that on the IPad?
Um… well you are correct, I was wrong. It isn’t Patty, but Paddy… which I confirmed at this site (and have fixed on the post). My sincerest apologies to anyone I offended. 🙂
As for how I did the image… I drew it with pencil and a black pen on a 3.5in square card, then scanned it onto my computer, where I then played with ‘Colorize’ in GIMP and it turned the pencil shaded sections green. 😀
Well, that is some impressive drawing! I am not Irish, by the way, so I was okay with the error!
Thanks 🙂 I have been playing around with Zentangle, basically you do a few steps and it creates a pattern, and it is also very soothing and meditation-like. The basic premise can be found here, and an index of quite a lot of patterns can be found here.
Wow.. This is cool…
What I do, is to draw stick insects.. I play with fractals and a few other doodling apps like Assembly..plus some zany ones like Matter
Those are cool, too. I didn’t know about those, now I understand why you asked if I did it on an iPad… I was confused before. 😛
Oh, I came across some fractal trees in one of the Zentangle books, I’m gonna have to try one of those soon.
I don’t think we get Zentangle books in India.. Shall ask my sis to bring one along
I bought them on Amazon. But you can also learn about Zentangle on the internet and watch youtube videos. 🙂
I think I will indeed check it out
Fun, fun, fun 🙂 And right back at you, Nic 🍀
Thanks, Stacy! 😀