Duo Tangle ~ Boo-Kee/Artoo

This week Laura Harms, the Diva, has challenged us to make a duo-tangle using the tangles Boo-Kee and Artoo, which she designed and named for her two boys. This week has been a difficult one at their house, what with one having a tonsilectomy (sp?) and the other visiting the ER. It's so difficult to have young ones that are sick and I know that she has had her hands full.

I had fully intended to have my offering done earlier in the week, but as quite often happens, my hands weren't working the best. So I mostly just browsed through the rest of the submissions and was amazed at all the beautiful ideas. The Diva's piece for the week is such a beautiful zendala and uses both tangles to their best advantage. I love both of these tangles and they are fun to do, but somehow I just wasn't managing to get them to play nicely together. So in the end, I did two similar tiles, but I do like one better than the other.  Here they are for your perusal.

This actually was the second tile that I completed, but since I like it better, I am posting it first. I had hoped to get the picture taken while there was still beautiful sunlight outside to show it off to it's best advantage, but it was dinner time so I had to wait until after dinner to take the picture. The blue-grey on the tile apparently is a shadow from my hand and shouldn't be there, but it is what it is. So anyway, here is the one that I actually like.

This is actually the first tile that I worked on and mostly didn't finish because I didn't know where to go with it. I loved the way the Boo-Kee started out, but they kind of overpowered the Artoo tangles and it just wasn't doing what I wanted. So I kind of took the same idea and did the second one (above). I may try again on these because I really like these two tangles together. Again, you can see the blue-gray shadow on the tile. I'll work on that next week and hopefully get the pictures taken earlier in the day and/or week.

I'm not sure if the background on this is showing up as well as I had hoped, but this was an experiment in a background treatment that was meant to look like diffused lighting in the background. It is called "bokeh" and is actually a photographic technique that has been adapted to use with rubber stamping. At least that is where I found all the instructions for it. I got some more white ink that should work better and I think that I will play with this one a bit more. Basically, all you do is blend the colors you want for your background to be very subtle and then take your white ink and use circle stencils and randomly place them over the background ink to indicate blurred lights in the background. I'll do so more and show the steps at a later date.


So that's my offerings for this week.  Thank you to all who have stopped by last week and left comments. It is always appreciated and as always, I always love comments and constructive criticism as well. If you haven't stopped by the Diva's blog yet (CLICK HERE), the hop on over there and take a look at all the wonderful artistic submissions for this (and other) challenges. I want you to know that I am not always able to leave comments on some of the submissions, for one reason or another, but I DO look at them all and appreciate them all.  See you all next week, and have a great ZEN-ful day!