Black on White …. Sea Turtle

Posted on September 9, 2018 by Tangles by the Sea

Judy, Julie and I met last week for their monthly “Tangle Night”. This time sea turtles were the topic of the day, using the sea turtle template from “Tangle Easy – Sea Life” by Ben Kwok. There are so many great templates in this book – if you want to create a ZIA with a sea life theme, this is the book for you. Ben’s designs are incredible; it’s so awesome he has shared these in the series of books called “Tangle Easy”.

Instead of just a plain white tile and our tangled turtle, we used strips of black bristol paper glued onto the white bristol 8×8 background. Next, we traced our sea turtle template on top of our newly created black and white “tile”. This technique calls for alternating black and white pens to get the overall effect. We used Sakura PN pens in black and the Sakura Gelly Roll 08.

Keeping in mind the two hour time frame, I precut the black strips so we only had to glue them down and the templates were ready to trace. We used fairly simple tangle patterns to fill the turtle – Emingle, Flux, Zander, Printemps, Myrr, Crescent Moon, and Tipple to name a few. We ended with embellishing the areas around the turtle with various patterns of “sea like” characteristics – Rixty, Crazy 8’s, Angelfish, Tipple, and Printemps. We ran out of time for shading, but felt the black on white did give us a nice shade effect so it was OK!

This was a fun way to create a different medium for our drawing. It’s always fun to mix up the pen colors. Just in case they really like this project and wanted to try it again – I gave Judy and Julie smaller pieces of paper (5×5) so they could create their own backgrounds, as well as a small fish template. I also shared a bookmark that I made combining the “Tangled Forest” idea, that we’d done in the past, with the black and white theme. Again, very fun … something different.

Judy