Angela Porter

Two drawings today, both done over the night as I couldn’t sleep as I really wasn’t at all well.

The larger one is a Zentangle ‘cartouche’. The central floral image is from one of Tim Holtz’s Ephemera packs. The paper is natural coloured mixed media paper by ClaireFontaine. I used a mixture of black, gold and rusty-red pens to draw the frame around the image. To add colour and shadow I used a mixture of pastel and graphite pencils, along with some tortillons. The design is approx. 12.5cm x 16cm (approx 3″ x 5″).

The smaller design is approx. 13cm x 8.5cm (3.3″ x 5.2″) in size. The paper is a piece of Medioevalis paper by Fabriano. This is lovely soft, gently textured paper that has a high cotton content. It’s easily damaged by the use of tortillons, however. So, I did add some shadows with a graphite pencil, but then added colour with Inktense pencils, brush and water. The paper really works well with wet media it seems. To draw the design I used a black fineliner, a brush pen and white and gold gelly roll pens.

I saw the ideas of cartouches, as a decorative frame around writing or image, and Zentangle designs on a youtube video and wanted to try it out. I decided to do that in the dark depths of the night when I wasn’t able to sleep. I may very well experiment with this idea as time goes on – particularly using drawings of my own as the focal point. I’ll see how it goes.