All of Derwent’s White Pencils

  Debbie often pulls out bits and bobs from her cupboard at the studio… Little trinkets… Inks.. Pens… Coloured markers… It keeps things interesting and keeps the ideas flowing for us at the studio.

  A while back, she took out these wooden cabochons that we then glued to blank tiles. I tried to make mine into a cartouches.

  And here’s a postcard-sized tile that I did just for fun. Gemstones are a great way to jazz up your art.

  A gemstone also sneaked into one of the tiles I did during Tea & Tangle session. Debbie was very ambitious- we had three “tangle of the day”. They were “Trinity”, “Ratoon”, and “Drawings”. Here are the tiles I created. (The tinting of the tiles was done in advance.)

  We've been adding small canvases to the studio recently. Debbie painted some of them, and we found an accidental art on her plastic palette after. 

Pretty!

  Inspired by Debbie’s post on which white shading tool is best for black paper, I decided to make my own discoveries on which Derwent pencil was best for black paper.

  I had six contenders…. The Tinted Charcoal, Coloursoft coloured pencil, Graphitint, Inktense, Lightfast coloured pencil, and Pastel pencil. Of the six options, the Graphitint and Inktense are water-soluble.

  I tested them without smudging, with smudging, and with water added (when applicable).

This was a black card from a scrapbook that Debbie bought from Daiso.

  The results were that the Pastel pencil produced the brightest white, but it also created the most amount of fallout. The Lightfast coloured pencil laid down really smoothly- kind of like butter. I like the Inktense when wet, but it’s difficult to control the consistency of coverage once you add water…

  The Graphitint is lovely, without creating nearly as much dust as the Pastel pencil. So it has become my tool to use for black tiles.

  Debbie gave me tiles from Alicia G. Rey, Zen Pig, and Strathmore to try, too. My tests on those tiles produced similar results to the one on the Daiso card.

Alicia G.Rey's tile.

Zen Pig

Strathmore

If you live in Singapore (or are visiting) you can buy Derwent products from Art Friend.

It’s fun playing around with new materials and figuring out what works best for you. What new and interesting art materials have you played with recently? Let me know in the comments.

mother's day gems

  Hello lovelies~ How has your week been? Half of my household is down with the flu right now. My husband and I are still going strong, thankfully. I've planned for us to go on a date to a board games cafe today. :) Very excited for that.

  Here's what I did for this week's Zentangle challenges. Joey wanted us to use the tangle, "Friendship". The Diva wanted us to use auras in our tiles. In the top tile, I used Friendship as a border tangle and added Featherfall. With the bottom tile, I echoed the gemstones of Friendship, and used Tripoli and Diva Dance Waltz.

I really like finding ways to join tiles together in a sketchbook.

  For Mother's Day, I created some paper flowers, inspired by the lovely li.la.o on Instagram. It was great fun, and I might just do a video tutorial on the project some time in the future.

  Even though I'm currently seven months pregnant, it didn't feel very Mother's Day-y for me... I'm guessing perhaps it'd feel more real next year. I did spend a lovely day with my mum. We went out shopping and for tea.

Done with Peerless watercolours.

  If you haven't seen it already, I posted a flip-through video of my Givetangle/Gratitangle 2017 sketchbook...

  I'm working on my spiral-bound Fabriano sketchbook. It contains drawings done using ballpoint pen or Neocolor. Here's one page I completed recently. It is a study done of a painting I found in an instructional book. I really like the colours. Looking at it on screen, I would darken the darks, though.

Neocolor II, used without water.

  And that is all I have for you this week. Thanks for stopping by.

Draw-wings

  Here's my sketchbook page for this week's Zentangle challenge. The Diva wanted us to create a tile to celebrate Earth Day, and Joey wanted us to use the tangle "Spoken". I tried to make my page colourful and resembling a sunset.

  Here's a page that I did just for fun. Featuring Fant-ik, Ilac, Diva Dance Waltz, and Printemps. I'll be teaching these patterns in my May classes.

  And here are some envelopes I created for the Travelling Tangles Project.

  I added some wax seals on the back of these envelopes.

  Pretty, isn't it?

  And here are some tiles that two of my students created last week. They are eight and twelve years old.

  Also, if you haven't seen it already, I posted a "How to Draw a Pink Gemstone" tutorial a couple of days ago.

  Thanks for dropping by. I'll see you next week. :)

How to Draw a Pink Gemstone with Tombow Markers

  Here's a video tutorial on how to draw a simple pink gemstone using Tombow's dual brush markers. I used colours from the set of ten, bright.

Cold Weather Tangles

  Last week, Singapore had its coldest weather in a long time. Temperatures dipped to 22°C (72°F). Usually, our days hover at a warm 27°C to 35°C (80°F to 95°F).

  Here's what I've been up to lately...

A Bijou tile from Yvette Campbell for Travelling Tangles.
I used Flux, Printemps, and Tipple. Then added shading using Derwent's Coloursoft coloured pencils.

  I also completed some tiles for last week's weekly challenges.

The Diva asked us to do a duotangle tile using Phicops and Huggins.
My tile ended up looking like a seashell washed up on the beach. So I added Peerless watercolours to further push that image.

Joey wanted us to use Ta-Da and a string.
I really liked her tile for that challenge.

  And here are my tiles for this week's challenge...

Joey asked us to use the tangle "Didada" (which was new to me) and string #237.

The Diva asked us to create a string using found objects. I kept it simple and just used a scissors. You can see the initial string in pencil on the left of the picture.

  And here's one last tile for Travelling Tangles. A beautiful tile was sent from Raye Burnett (she drew the gem) to Debra Huff (she added the bezel. The tile was the sent to me. I added the blue background and echoed Deb’s lovely striping.

  And that's it for this week. Thanks for popping by. :)

sketchbook pages

  Let's kick it off with a tile I did as a Draw With Me video. I really am growing to love my Tombow markers. Featuring Abeko, a hit of Flukes, and Fe-Ba in the background.

  For this week's challenge, Diva (home) and Joey (a star string). I decided to combine them in a tile that features my tangle, Singapore Sling. That's as home-y as I can get. I literally used a tangle that has my home-country's name in it. hahaha If you'd like to learn how to draw it, you can click here.

At the bottom of the page, I did a tile for "Zentangle: Tangled & Journaled, Too!" group on Facebook. They're doing a summer project and even though we don't get a summer break in Singapore, I am following along on the prompts.

  Here's another page. It's not complete yet, but I really like how the gemstone turned out. It was done using Tombow markers, too.

  And here's one more page, in full black and white.

 

catching up

  Here's the second workshop that we had for the collaborative art work to be completed for Bukit Batok East CC.

  It was truly so much fun.

  I'm playing catch-up for weekly challenges. I've been distracted by the Summer project under "Zentangle: Tangled & Journaled, Too!" on Facebook. I've also did personal projects, namely; two small canvases for my living room. They were done using Identi pens, with highlights added using a Signo Broad pen. The gold of the canvas comes from a spray. I did this first one on my own.

The edges have Diva Dance Waltz on it.

  And then did this pink one whilst teaching my niece to do a gold one on her own. We had a great time. The pink was done with neon acrylic paint.

  Here's what my 7 year-old niece did.

  In other news, I will be teaching my first online course. I will be teaching alongside seven other teachers. In my video, you will learn how to merge tangles together. I will be posting a picture of what you'll learn in another post really soon. Until then, there is an early bird special going on and the price of the course is discounted. So if you'd like to check it out, you can visit it via this link to find out more.

  Thanks for dropping by. I hope to see you again soon. :)

I see your true colours...

  I've been working on my tiles for various weekly Zentangle challenges. They're all being done in my sketchbook. But I've been so busy for the past week that I've not gotten around to completing them. I'm so sorry I haven't been posting here, either... 

  Here are some tiles from the Travelling Tangles Project that I've been working on...

  Sandy Kelley-Jones did the start to this wonderful tile. The obvious choice would be to have complete the Huggins, but I refused to take the easy route. Instead, I added a curvy version of Floatfest, plus Cadent and then went super crazy with Striping it. (That's why it took a while for me to complete the tile....) The original Huggins then became a sort of river. This was fun!

  Here's another one from Kat van Rooyen.

  I secretly hate working on black Zentangle® tiles because of how much they absorb the ink from my white pen.... And so it takes a while to get my lines to look as opaque as I want them to be. But I still had fun with it. I added some gems, and then made everything look like a bracelet.

Pretty tassels.

  Also notice how I'm toying with the idea of changing my initial? It's a triangle with a dot in the middle in the last two tiles... But I'm still reverting back to my cursive "s" initial, so I'm not sure yet... Here's a tile from Sabrina Kirjavainen.

  And here's my finish. I'm teaching that fan-shaped looking pattern in my classes this month. ^-^

  And one last one. This one is from the Diva herself, Laura Harms.

  And here's what I did with it.

  If you didn't know yet, I also cut my hair!

  And here's just one last tile that I did for fun. I've sent it off to one of my best friends who currently lives in London. It's the same tile; the one on the left side is just the line art, the one on the right is after I added colours with Peerless watercolours, and shading with a grey Fabrico marker.

Shading with markers is tough, but I think I did a good job.

  I hope you enjoyed seeing what pretty things I've created in the past week. I've been working on other things, too. It's just that they're not completed yet so I didn't want to show you yet. Until next week.... Keep tangling!

The Art & Science of Gems

The Art & Science of Gems by Van Cleef & Arpels (with the participation of the French National Museum of Natural History) is an exhibition that is currently being held at the ArtScience Museum.

  The museum opens daily from 10am to 7pm, daily. And the exhibition will be on from now till' the 14th of August 2016. The exhibition showcases over 450 pieces of jewellery from the Van Cleef & Arpels Collection. In parallel to that collection, the French National Museum of Natural History in Paris is also showing over 250 gems and minerals.

  That adds up to a lot of pretty things to look at so obviously this is going to be a picture-heavy post. If you live in/are going to visit Singapore and intend on going to see this exhibition... I suggest you skip this post because seeing the gems and jewellery in person is so much more breath-taking, and I wouldn't want to steal the magic of seeing all of the items on display for the first time away from you.

  If you're coming along on this virtual tour, though... Let me set the scene in your mind....


  The exhibition space is dimly lit in order to highlight each of the pieces on display. There is a hush silence. You cannot even hear footsteps because the carpet dampens the noise of people walking around the exhibition space. The air smells very crisp. I remember the last time I visited this area of the ArtScience museum. The exhibition at that point in time showed contemporary paintings and photographs. The space was bright, and there wasn't any carpeting. My... my... How much effort they put in to really bring us a new experience.

  The first space you see after you walk in is this:

  Multiple lit columns that showcase each beautiful piece of jewellery. All of them beckoning you to look closer at them...

   And this... This is Van Cleef & Arpels signature pieces. The Zip necklace. It's a necklace now... But you can remove a small section of the necklace, zip it up (yes. you read that right. the zip is fully functional. how cool is that?) And you can convert it to...

  ... a bracelet!

This was a still taken from a video that was being played on a tv screen in the exhibition space.

  It is at this point that I'd also like to point out how beautiful the exhibition space itself has been made to be.

That's me; yes.
There were these blue tassels hanging all around the exhibition. You can see a giant quartz behind me. Yes; that huge bright white glowing thing is a quartz.

Looking skywards.

  And now moving on to more shiny things.

  They had little areas where you could do certain activities that had to do with the exhibition. Like make your own jewels from plastic shapes that they had:

  Or fold your own jewels:

(I took mine home to complete, so this picture was taken at home.)

The pink topaz are the rarest, they say.

I wonder what the plural form of "topaz" is....
"Topazes"? "Topazi"?

  I'm currently in love with opals. And I'm planning on making a tutorial on how to draw an opal soon. But for now, enjoy these pictures:

It's amazing the amount of details the human eye can see.
The opals were so much more nuanced in real life...

  Shimmery gold that I felt pictures could not do justice so I took a video instead:

Reminded me of Akoya.

Lastly, a crown with a jewel so large, it casts a shadow on itself.

  I hope you had fun on this virtual tour. ^-^  And I hope you gained some inspiration from the many pictures shown in this post. Until next time... Keep tangling~