Elements of Elephant #StillmanAndBirn #LunarBlue #Zentangle

On Monday's post I shared a watercolor painting that I did using Daniel Smith's Lunar Blue.  I wanted to play with it some more, so I covered a couple of pages in my Stillman and Birn Delta sketchbook, and set about to discover how it does as a background for Zentangle-Inspired Art.

I'm not as pleased with the results as I thought I would be, but I've got another page to play with, and I learned a lot from this one.



The Lunar Blue gives the impression of great texture.  All those wrinkles are an illusion, though.  I covered the entire page, then dropped color wet-into-wet here and there. And then I spattered.  I like the look of the spatter, but wishes I hadn't done it once I got started.

This elephant, and the one in the lower left corner, popped out at me right off.  I saw the other two as I was tangling.  So there was no doubt in my mind that this was going to be an elephant-themed page, lol.

So what problems did I encounter?  You can probably see it in the photo above.  If you use enough pigment, and apply it after the page is already saturated with color, Lunar Blue becomes quite a dark gray.  That means it fights for dominance over the black ink pen that I used (Ohto Graphic Liners in varying sizes).  The page is just too busy.

I tried to overcome this by going very heavy with the ink, knowing it probably wouldn't work, but hoping for a pleasant surprise.  I shouldn't do that, lol.  

Once I finished tangling, I used a Sakura Moonlight Fluorescent Pink Gelly Roll pen to get more of a value range and help the tangles stand out. But that elephant still didn't work.

Reluctantly, I glazed him with a light wash of Zinc White.  That helped him stand out, but ugly? Oh yeah.  I lifted away a little of the glaze, but saw that it was just getting uglier, and decided to let it go, lessons learned.

I know to keep my Lunar Blue lighter if I want to add black ink line work.  Definitely no splatter.  The other page is lighter than this one, but still too dark for black ink.  The pink gel pen showed up much better, but based on my watercolor painting on Monday I think a full of transparent colors is a better choice.  I probably won't get that done until the weekend, but hopefully I'll have more adventures with Lunar Blue to share with you next week.