what a hoot

It would have been so easy to get carried away by this week's Diva Challenge.  I could have spent ages searching the house for exciting things to use to make my string, but then I would never have got to the tangling!  Instead I grabbed the first thing that came to hand from the stationary drawer.

And this is the result.  A strange tulip? An owl perhaps, with Crescent Moon eyes and Onamato beak? or maybe just a pair of scissors filled with Baton, and a sort-of Balo going down onto the blades.

dream a little dream

For this week's Diva Challenge we were invited to use Fanz.  I liked its shape straightaway, but couldn't find quite the right fill.  I put a few down in my sketchbook, went away, came back, added a few more, tinkered and tried and then... suddenly I hit on this fill.  And I loved the way it looked like wrought iron. 

And I thought about how one of the many dreams my partner and I have (and we have many and most of them will remain unfulfilled, but that's okay because we believe that sometimes just having the dream is enough) is to have a design cast in metal which we would position against a brightly painted shed. 

And if we did, and we allowed things to grow up it, like Shelly Beauch's beautiful Wist, maybe it would look a bit like this tile.

a feast of flux

If I take the time to sit with one tangle, and really get to know it, drawing it over and over again, in new and/or similar ways, I always seem to get pleasing results.  The simpler the tangle the broader the results.  This happened when I worked with Flux on a previous Diva Challenge with these results.  This week's Diva Challenge asked us to look again at this humble tangle and I loved every minute of time I spend in its company.  I feel I've expanded on some of the previous ways I used it and taken it in new directions too.

Flux Framed - some with darkened centres,
and some slighty blotchy block shading.

Puddle of Flux - dodging this way and that, with
darkened N'Zeppel between rather than the usual Tipple

Flux Squared - I just wanted to see if it would work
in a grid.  And it did.  With sepia lines, a couple of different
centre details and some rounding to add weight.