Colouring Page – 14 April 2023

I’ve created an unusual, for me, colouring page for members of the Angela Porter’s Coloring Book Fans facebook group. It’s a tesselated/tiled pattern created using one of my recent mandalas.

It’s a lot of fun to use my artwork in an app called Repper and create new, geometric patterns from it.

I did have to redraw the basic unit (tile) of the pattern to clean it up and remove some tiny details. But that let me adjust the pattern a little too.

For my coloured example, I used a palette of medieval illuminated manuscript inspired colours – red, green, gold and blue almost jewel tones.

The colour really does help to make sense of the pattern. It also brings out different ways in which the different layers and motifs are joined together, which really makes me smile!

It’s not until I look at it now that I can see the way the contrast and highlights have added a lot of layers and depth to the design.

I may have to do more of these in the future; they’re just so much fun!

Pattern Explorations – Borders 1, Day 2

All the patterns in my sketchbook, and the arch, are variations of a basic grid pattern. A pattern based on Romanesque architecture – something I really, really love.

As I filmed the drawing of the arched patterns, I made many ‘mistakes’, which I worked with to create more variations.

Adding shadow to the central border in the arch really brought it to life. Something that made me smile, a lot. In fact, working with geometric patterns, especially ones that remind me so much of the architecture that I love, made me smile a lot.

It’s amazing how many patterns that are distinctly different can come from the same basic architecture of the pattern – the pencil grid and the initial zig-zag shapes in this example.

I do hope you have a look at the video and have a go at drawing along with me.

Sketchtember Day 28 | Zentangle Tile

This morning, I needed to have some calm and relaxed creating time.

I started by drawing a pencil grid of squares and triangles to work in. Next, a visit to TanglePatterns.com led me to the motifs, or fragments in Zentangle-speak, that I wanted to use.

The central motifs are a slight variation on Nayu by Eniko Kaneko CZT. This morning, I just couldn’t get the overlapping of the ‘ribbons’ right.

The triangle motifs around the edge are Caro by Lucy Farran CZT. This wasn’t the first choice. I had wanted to do a kind of triangle Celtic Knot, but again, I just couldn’t get it to work for me. Caro has worked out well, with the little flowers reminding me of spring violets.

Materials used:
• 4″ x 4″ grey Fabriano Tone Paper
• Tombow Fudenosuke pen, black
• Inktense pencils in Lagoon, Violet and Sun Yellow along with a damp brush
• White, grey and black pastel pencils with a paper stump / tortillon
• White Sakura Soufflé pen
• Purple and yellow Sakura Stardust pens

I especially needed some time with no pressure on me. Yesterday’s headache turned into a headache with a really upset stomach and I’m feeling fragile and still not right. So, it’s definitely going to be a quiet, easy day for me.

Art Quote

Artwork © Angela Porter | Artwyrd.com

After doing some statistics for a friend, I turned my attention to art. I noticed I had the desktop version of Repper pro and thought I’d have a play around with one of my Entangled Gardens drawings.

Repper pro is an app that allows me to make repeating patterns from my own artwork quite easily. I made a few, including the border above, in a short time. It’s now available online, for a monthly subscription.

I like to use a border of my art against a favourite quote, I thought I’d do that today, though I did take some liberties with the quote and replace “his” with the gender non-specific “their” as not all artists are male!

I do like repeating patterns, and I particularly like this border. I also like that I can make use of my artwork in different ways.

I know that my art reflects my soul, my heart, what gives me pleasure in drawing and in seeing too. Even this border makes me smile gently, both on my lips and eyes and in my heart too. I think I may give more of myself away than I realise when I create art. I think all artists and creatives do.

As I grow and develop my artistic voice, there’s still that quality of line, colour, composition that is distinctly me. Others may work in a similar way, but there’s still something unique about each of us, things about our art that set us apart from each other. These differences can be obvious or subtle, but each is a unique calling card for each artist or creative.

Repeating patterns 20 September 2018

Angela Porter Seamless Tiles 20 September 2018 small

The other day I had a bit of fun with a program called Repper Pro. It allows you to easily make tiles from any image you have saved on your computer. These tiles can then be turned into tiled patterns which are seamless.

I used just two of my latest abstract botanicals and after less than an hour I had saved over 100 tiles to my hard drive! You can see some of my favourite ones above.

Some of these tiles were made from tiles I’d created rather than the original artwork.

I would love to see some of these as patterns for cushions or framed pictures in canvas work or cross stitch. I also think they’d make beautiful fronts for greetings cards or note cards just as they are. In fact, some of the patterns I prefer as single tiles rather than as repeating tiled patterns.

Here are just four of these as tiled patterns. I think they’re lovely, and I’m amazed how easy it is to use the Repper software and how my artwork can be used in this way too.

I’m not sure if they’d make wonderful fabric, they could be too busy for lots of applications, but then this is all personal preference for sure.

Angela Porter Repeating pattern 20 September 2018 04

Angela Porter Repeating pattern 20 September 2018 03

Angela Porter Repeating pattern 20 September 2018 02

Angela Porter Repeating pattern 20 September 2018 01

Tuesday Tip

Angela Porter 24 April 2018 small watermarked

My #tuesdaytip is to do just this – create every day!

It doesn’t matter for how long – 5 minutes, 10 minutes, an hour, longer.  Just take time to create.

You can create something new.  You can work on practicing, say, your hand lettering. You could re-work or add to something you thought was finished.  You could try a new skill or technique or medium. You could doodle aimlessly.

There’s just so many possibilities, so many ways to be creative – art, crafts, cooking, gardening, wood-turning, sculpting, decorating, sewing, colouring, are just a few of the possibilities.

Just create.  Have fun.  Play. Relax.

Take a break from the worries, stresses and strains of everyday life by focusing on being creative.

I use art to help me find my inner calm and stay there.  My whole body exhales, calms and relaxes when I ‘art’. It’s a daily practice for me that has a similar effect as meditation and mindfulness does. Even if I don’t meditate every day, I ‘art’ every day, just for pleasure (as well as for my work).

When the days are very trying for me, as they have been lately due to a nightmare of a car breakdown and recovery that took 8 hours Saturday night into Sunday morning, I find creating collections of doodles and patterns for my BuJo or hand-writing quotes or words really soothing, especially if they are familiar to me.  That’s what I needed at that time, something I could do automatically, that didn’t cause more stress for me.  The rhythm and flow soothed. Just the process of repeating the drawings and drawing of letters involved practice and improvement of my favourite motifs, patterns, words; and when calm, I could move on to create something new.

Being creative isn’t just about making great works of art or craft, or any thing else.  It’s also about feeding your heart, your soul, your being and finding calm and joy in what you do.

 

 

Today’s clutch of repeated patterns.

Having more fun in between more ‘serious’ work, not that any of my arty times are ‘serious’, they’re all fun!  I’m so lucky to make a business out of  something that is always pure contentment to do – create art.

#createdonsurface

#autodesksketchbook

Repeating pattern

Tile11 onelayer Angela Porter small and watermarked

Oh, I’m having so much fun creating repeating patterns!  There is something inside me that loves geometry and symmetry and messing around with dimension, and it gives me a bit of a creative break from the contract work I have at the moment.  Not that I’m not enjoying that, ‘cos I am, but sometimes it’s nice to do something a bit different.

I used one of my entangled drawings of late with the Repper program, GiMP and Autodesk Sketchbook Pro along with my Microsoft Surface Book and Surface Pen to create this.

The colours came from this months color palette challenge over on the Angela Porter’s Coloring Book Fans facebook group, though I added the teal green into the palette.

Repeating patterns, my first experiment

Pattern 18 coloured v01 watermarked

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about and looking at how to make repeating patterns.

I’ve tried the old fashioned way of working on paper and cutting the paper and so on, and not found the results at all satisfactory.

I’ve had a bit of a go in Adobe Illustrator, but I find Illustrator so confusing and frustrating to use.  There seems to be a total disconnect between my brain and the software architecture of Illustrator, and other similar pieces of software.

A day or two ago I found a little app in the Microsoft Store called Amaziograph that lets me create repeating patterns in sheet form, which is great if I want a sheet of black and white repeating, entangled line art, but not what I want if I want a coloured repeating pattern.  Oh, the app is a lot of fun to mess around with for sure and no doubt I will use it to generate patterns.

Looking around at software today, a lot of it either works in Illustrator or is prohibitively expensive given that I just want to have a play, see what I can come up with and see if it’s something that I’d like to spend more time with.  Where they offer free trials, I know they’re not going to be a long enough trial for me to get to grips with Illustrator and the software/plugins, so I’d not be able to make my mind up.

So, on a wander around the corners of Google, I found a lovely little program called Repper. It had an online trial version that I could play with quite happily, and I decided to purchase it afterwards.

In Repper, you open your own artwork and use parts of it to create repeating patterns.  The pattern above is an example of that, kind of.

What I did was to take one of my coloured mandala patterns and use that to create a pattern that was pleasing to me.  Actually, I had many, many patterns that were pleasing to me, and I saved them as tiles that would form a repeating pattern.  With some, I saved them as a surface pattern, where the tiles were already repeated.

What is nice is that the program lets me set both the size and quality of the tile or surface image.

Next, I put the  tile I particularly liked into GiMP (GNU image Manipulation Program, open source software) to copy the black lines and create a new, uncoloured tile with a transparent background.

Autodesk Sketchbook Pro was my next destination so that I could colour the tile as I liked.  Not so easy where the edges of the tiles will meet  and to have no edges showing up.

The tile is partly finished in terms of colour, but I wanted to see how it would look tiled.  Go, back to GiMP I went and the above was the result!

My head now hurts a little after this, which means I need more tea, LOTS more tea and a bit of a break.

I absolutely love that I can take my artwork and use it to create more interesting designs and patterns with.  It’s absolutely fascinating, very easy to get lost in it all.

Definitely a very nice way to spend a few hours on a chilly and very rainy afternoon!  My Surface Book and Surface Pen have had a good workout in the process too!