#poke-leaf

I'm back, and it's a holiday challenge. I often have difficulty with these, but I do love St. Patrick's Day, even if my tile is not what one might expect this holiday to inspire.

"Valentangle" This is not likely to be one of my gems. Most things I do that are theme-based are pretty abstract, since representational art is not a skill with which I was endowed. Valentine's Day is love, love is organic, love grows. Here ya go.

Here's my first post about a project, one I'll be presenting Wednesday night at Group (i.e., the collection of lovely people with whom I get to spend an evening zentangling© every once in a while. First things first, this was inspired by a recent post at The Enthusiastic Artist, in which Margaret Bremner turned a mistake into something beautiful. Since her mistakes are generally better than my actual work, I twisted it a bit and came up with this. My original idea was to make a zendala and then cut it up into Artist Trading Cards. Try it; if you did  your zendala right, all your ATCs will look pretty much the same, which is not what I had in mind. So. I created a template, roughly 7 x 7 inches, with interior lines that approximate ATC size. I printed the template onto a nice piece of textured ivory bond paper. (It's hard to see, but it's there.)

I kept the thought of a zendala in mind, but I made it square, using the whole space. I scanned the image at this point, because sometimes, stuff happens. (This is known as foreshadowing,)

Then I added color, using gel/glitter pens, Ta-dah! I liked what I had, and I copied it, but didn't scan it because the phone rang. Yada, yada, yada, I cut the original instead of the copy (done that before) and so now, with the help of clear tape on the back and so forth, here's the final design:

and here it is, cut along the lines in the original template into 6 ATCs.