hello darkness, my old friend

Sometimes I wonder if the tangles I chose to use and the colours I select on any given day bear relation to what's on my mind, or what's going on in the world.  Maybe not, but I can't rule it out.  As the UK election pounds toward its conclusion my sense of hope tinged with doom casts a shadow over everything I do.  And so I find myself making heavy use of black in recent tiles.  None more so than on these two.

I selected a couple of tiles from my Leftovers pile. A striped green one that I did very early on in my dabblings with colour - I've often been drawn to the colours but found the strong stripes off putting.  But breaking them up with some dark curls showcasing a variation of Papermint that Sandy Hunter recently shared on Facebook really did the trick.  I was tempted to leave the centre section empty and then changed my mind and popped in another Sandy tangle - a nameless one I admired on one of her blog posts.      

 

I feel a sense of hope when I look at this tile - it's like I'm peering through vines and ferns in a magical forest and the green of livingness is so vivid I feel I could taste it, and there just ahead is a sparkling curtain of water droplets, perhaps a waterfall, perhaps just a tree shaking off the recent rain.

Things took a darker turn with the second tile.  This crazed background I made a while ago while testing out my Brusho powders.  They have a certain charm but are hard to tame - perhaps better to let them do their thing and then work with them rather than against.  I saw crushed berries and bruises before I began, but perhaps the influence of the Dracula television series we are currently watching seeped in because this is what happened when I added three sections of 2V (recently shared on Tanglepatterns).

2V is a great tangle, striking for it's ability to look great even without shading.  But it's one that, for me at least, needs a lot of concentration not to make a mistake on.  The section on the left went very well, with only a tiny error, but when I started on the one on the right it all started to fall apart, when I made a few wrong connections and divided a couple of my sections into too small a triangles!  It looks like it's collapsing, unable to hold itself with the elegance of the section on the left.  But I think we all have days when we feel like that!  

There's an undeniable darkness to this tile - I imagine myself in a desecrated church, staring up at the stained glass windows and wondering how much longer they will hold themselves together.  I also picture bloody pennants hung from the ramparts of victor's castles.  And while it's felt tooth and nail at times lately, thankfully we don't decide our leaders on the battlefield these days!