Hollins Butterfly

This year is my 20th college reunion!  Where did the time go?  I swear that I still feel 21 on the inside!

I attended Hollins College (now University) in Roanoke, VA.  It is a small, liberal arts college for women. The campus sits near the base of Tinker Mountain (where Tinker Tangles takes it's name.) and I am so grateful for my time there.  There are many activities during reunion weekend.  Mini classes, dinners, cocktails, tours of campus and enjoying the great Visual Arts center. The official kickoff is on the Saturday of reunion, when there is a parade of classes.  One of my former classmates asked me to help with a theme for our class.  The first thing that popped into my head was butterfly wings.  Why?  Who knows. But I figured that we could wear wings in the colors of the school and they could symbolize the wings that we have used to carry us these 20 years we have been away.  Plus, everyone loves Butterflies.  I hope so anyway.

Another dear friend asked me if I could make a tshirt for us to wear and if I would create a zentangle to put on it.  Well, I said that I would give it the "old college try" (heh, heh). This is the image I came up with.

 Using the school colors of green and gold (or yellow here), I created this. I drew with a green micron and colored in with a yellow tombow marker.  I also did a few highlights with a yellow sakura gel pen.

Now that I had the drawing done, the real test was to see if I could set up a place on zazzle to make them available to my classmates to buy.  You can even get one here if you'd like.  There are some that say reunion on them and some that are just the butterfly.

I have to say that I am pleased with how they came out.  The design looks best on a white shirt, but I also got it on yellow and I think it looks great.

Happy 20th Reunion to my fellow alumnae!

Earth Day!

Guess what?!  I finally finished one of the Diva's challenges in time to post it!  Shocking I know, as it has been a long time.  I've been checking in every week, and I've even started some, but I've either not finished them or not finished in time.  So, I tried really hard to get mine completed this week.

Following The Diva's example, I too chose to do a zendala.  I don't have any of the nifty tiles though, so I made my own.  I used my circle cutter and cut out a 4" circle on watercolor paper.  I then traveled over the Erin's site The Bright Owl, and pulled my template from Challenge #52.  Being Earth Day, I wanted a template with circles in it and this one jumped out at me.

4" watercolor paper, micron pens and pencil

I knew that I wanted some blue and green on the zendala, so I decided that I'd use them in the middle.  I picked Diva's Dance in blue to be my "water".  For my "earth" circles, I just kind of made it up.  I wanted to have something that looked like fields from above.  I started with squares and then just filled them with rotating patterns or filled the space with just green.  I'm not sure how I feel about the design as a tangle pattern, but it works here for what I was aiming for.  Now, I needed to do the outer sections.  Again, I wanted to have patterns that felt organic or earthy to me.  I used Beeline because, bees!  The other sections are Zin, mostly because I messed up my Beeline set up.  But hey! There are no mistakes in Zentangle.  I had these lovely triangles and Zin fit in perfectly.  The outer edges I used Verve and Tipple.  I thought that Tipple looked like gravel or a rock pile.  After that, I added a little shading and BOOM! I was done.

I really wasn't sure how it would turn out when I got started, but I am pleased with the final result.  As is often the case, shading helped a lot.  The blue and green felt really flat as I opted to not shade the patterns in the circles.  Just the little shade on the edges where they overlap really popped them out and away from each other.

While I have your attention - if you've made it this far- I wanted to share the tile I did for last week's star theme.  I did get it finished in time, but I did not blog it in time.  So without chatter and more words, here are stars!

Well, a little more.  I used watercolor for the blue, micron pen to draw and a little silver sakura gel pen for the lines.  I wanted to give the impression that the stars are shooting stars.  Not sure it works as zooming but I tried!

Thanks for stopping by!