Stencilled Flux Tangleation

Hi and welcome back to another week on the Chrissie Murphy Designs Blog. I am sharing something completely different for this week’s Tangle Creative Process Mapping Post. I’m calling it a Stencilled Flux Tangleation. This month subscribers and I are focusing on Flux, a tangle pattern originally deconstructed by Zentangle®. I am loving the intensity of studying one pattern for a month and I couldn’t help myself, I had to try to create a tile with one of the Flux Tangleations. Let’s get into it and see how this tile was created.

It all began with a Flux Tangleation

Week One of our Focus on Flux has been concentrating on Tangleations. Below is a picture of the Tangleations I came up for the week with and I really loved the Tangleation I called Ridging. I loved it so much I couldn’t wait to use it!

Below a picture of another Tangleation I loved by Jem Miller. Jem shared her hollowed out Tangleation of Flux with us and it’s another version that I think is absolutely awesome.

If you’re playing along with our Focus on Flux as well, don’t for get to tag your work with #CMDFocusOnFlux. Make sure your post is set to public so I can see it and I’ll share your work here, on Insta stories and Facebook and in the next Talking Tangles newsletter.

Rifling through my Stencils

I really wanted to work with stencils again and I was stoked to find I had a Flux shaped stencil! It was perfect for this month. I have collected quite a few background stencils over the years and I want to begin working with them as I tangle. Stencilled Flux Tangleations seemed like a great place for me to begin.

I placed my stencil over my Strathmore Artist Tile and secured it for blending by using some painters tape.

Then it was time to colour

Aaah colours… I have so many ideas when it comes to colour…

In October last year I spent some time at the Botanical Gardens in Cairns, Australia. I was surrounded by tangle patterns that had come to life and I was taking photos left, right and centre! Gardens are magnificent places for seeing tangle patterns in real life. I always come away fired up to create.

Above is a photo I captured from that time that I really love. I’ve used a Color palette generator to extract the colours within it, and I created my Stencilled Flux Tangleation with these colours as my inspiration.

I used my blender with my Distress Inks and spent some time blending colours. I used the following Distress Inks for this tile:

• Lucky Clover

• Mustard Seed

• Peacock Feather

• Twisted Citron

When I felt that I had achieved a smooth blend between the colours, I removed the tape and rotated the stencil.

That was only the first pass, so after rotating, I secured it again with tape and then applied another layer of colour with my blender. I wanted to create some interest and overlap, just like what‘s represented by the leaves in my reference photo.

Time to ink

I’ve been getting some guidance about my work from an artist friend I’ve grown to trust and admire. She’s helping me to explore and develop my own style as an Artist and originally I had started inking this in black. My friend suggested using a softer colour, like green or grey for the inking. I agreed with her wholeheartedly, and scrapped what I was doing to start again. The next time I used a green Sharpie fine tipped marker and a green Uniball.

The green ink softened the piece just as she advised it would (compared to the black) and it helped to maintain the original colouring inspired by my reference image.

I set about inking my Flux Tangleations with Ridging and adding ink to the negative spaces of the tile by adding done bits of Caviar randomly.

Shading my Stencilled Flux Tangleation

I wasn’t 100% sure how I was going to shade the tile because it was such a chaotic layout! For this reason I chose to shade any area where there was overlap. I used my trusty grey Copic Markers in Cool Tones C4 and C5 and sparingly applied the Warm Tone W7 in some minimal areas.

Lastly I used a 5B pencil to shade some other areas where I felt it was too light. Looking back now though I see this as a mistake as I should have stopped after the Copics. The graphite added a warm tone to the overall cool tone of the tile and I’m not a fan of this type of contrast.

I opted to erase some of the shading to soften and cool the tile. This isn’t something I recommend doing, but I felt it was needed in this instance.

You better believe it…. I added more colour

I then grabbed my Prismacolor Pencils in coordinating colours, these were colours that were similar to my original reference image. I added more colour over the entire piece, working hard to mimic the colour work of the original distress ink blend from the Stencilled base stage. I actually found this quite difficult as I struggled to see where I had applied colour versus where I hadn’t, but I persevered.

I used the following Prismacolor Premier Coloured Pencils for this piece:

• PC 910 True Green

• PC 989 Charteuse

• PC 1005 Lime Peel

• PC 909 Grass Green

• PC 913 Spring Green

• PC 916 Canary Yellow

Highlights and Embellishment

As usual, I finished the tile by applying highlights and embellishments using my white Signo Uniball pen and Kaisercraft glitter gel pens in coordinating colours.

I always apply some little dots and dashes as highlights and embellishments and it seems to finalise the tile, ground it and make it pop all at once.

My finished Stencilled Flux Tangleation

So here it is, my finished Stencilled Flux Tangleation tile. I used a 6in x 6in Strathmore Artist Tile in white to give you an idea of the overall size.

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Until next time, listen to your heart and sharpen your coloured pencils. A masterpiece awaits!

Bless you my friend

Chrissie xx