Starry, starry Zendala

This week Erin gave us the star treatment for the Zendala challenge.  I get excited to see what Erin has come up with each week and then I am surprised at what my mind's eye sees in the design.  In my first challenge I saw surfboards and in this challenge, I saw a sheriff's badge and gun.  I fought that idea at first though.  Guns and law enforcement are not exactly zen.  Know what I mean?

So, fighting the idea of guns, I went first to flowers.  I started in the center here and added Arc Flower to the circle. I put Knightsbridge in the center to give it a little more interest.  Next I did the points of the stars.  I was tempted with other patterns but I wanted to play with stripes.  I divided the point to give the stripes a little more interest.  I repeated Knightsbridge in the smaller circles for several reasons.  One, I wanted to repeat to tie it in with Arc Flower and the other was to bump up the graphic-ness of the zendala.  That left me with the beautiful scalloped section to work with.  I was stuck here as I wasn't sure what to use.  In the end, I kept it simple.  I divided it into sections and drew lines.  To my great surprise, the lines seemed to set the Knightsbridge circles off so I shaded them to further pop them up off the page.

I haven't gotten any of the round Zendala tiles yet.  I'm putting them on my wish list though. Maybe for my birthday this fall someone will surprise me.  I liked the idea of the circle so I just traced everything onto a piece of watercolor paper.

The whole time I was working on the Zendala above though, I could not get the badge and gun image from my mind.  So, I decided to just do one anyway.  I traced out the design on some drawing paper and went to work.  I looked at images of sheriff's badges on line to give me some ideas of what they look like.  Braided edges were often repeated so I used those.  I added a few lines to reinforce the star.  Then it was time for my gun.  I found out that the chamber of a gun is not usually decorated.  Not on the side that would be visible on this angle anyway.  I tried to make the circles look as if we were looking through the chamber of an unloaded pistol.  I haven't done any shading yet.  I may go back and add some.  The weather was so nice today that I went ahead and photographed this.

Thanks so much to Erin for creating these templates each week.  I don't know how you do them, but I am so very glad that you do.