Altenew Academy Zentangle Lesson 2

Hi Everyone, and welcome back! Thanks for joining me for Altenew Academy‘s, Zentangle For Cardmakers, second lesson with Amber Davis. I cannot tell you how excited I am for this class! This lesson of the Zentangle cat-kins was so much fun to practice.

altzen29 — *Practice, practice, practice! These are behind the scenes samples I created in trying to work through my ideas and perfect the technique.*

I shared some basic tips I discovered after the first lesson, and I found most of those to be true in practicing these cat-kins. (You can find those tips and tricks HERE.) I don’t have many new tips after this lesson, and I don’t want to give away Amber’s points in this post. I highly recommend that you take the class if you are interested in this art form, because I think she does a phenomenal job. (Click HERE for the Altenew Academy link.)

Amber challenged us to use ink blots with cat-kins to create a background in which the branches would “hide” between and among the ink spots. Now, you know how much I love creating distressed or vintage inked backgrounds, but I struggled to get it “just right” for this card. The key element for the cat-kins was to leave enough white space, and this proved to be difficult with the usual blotting technique. So I ended up using the splatter stencil to to be able to strategically place ink, and this worked well.

I decided on the color scheme for this card based on the beautiful new artist markers set D that I just purchased. However, I thought the twigs and detail of the dotted blooms stamped images competed with the cat-kins and ink spots on the background panel. The above samples show how I decided that the added vellum helps to soften the background yet still maintain great interest.

altzen22 — *Don’t these flowers look pretty with the pink and turquoise colors combined?*

altzen23 — *I stamped the flowers in London Fog Memento ink for a no-line colored image with the artist markers.*

altzen24 — *Here you can better see the detail of the background, and how soft it looks with the vellum overlay.*

So what do you think? Are you ready to “tangle” along with us? It’s not too late to join Amber in the classroom! I love, love, love all of the cards people are posting in the gallery. Thanks for stopping by again today! Love and artsy hugs!

Erin

PS – No affiliate links were used in this blog post. I just like to share some of my favorite crafty products in case you are interested in them as well. All ideas and opinions are my own.