Studio Sneak Peek: Snowflakes

While staring at a blank 30″ x 40″ canvas during a pre-Christmas morning rebounding session, I received a vision for a painting of a couple standing together in tree pose.  The background was to be filled with large snowflakes in the Zentangle® style.  Saturday’s snowy photo shoot (see previous post) was perfect to get me in the mood.  This is also true of the book “Zen Doodling Mandalas that I picked up in Ottawa over the holidays (a natural purchase since I had already decided to create a dozen 30″ x 30” mandalas in 2015).  As I’m waiting for my $1000 order of canvas to launch that project, I decided to start on my painting of the couple, using the snowflake instructions from one of the chapters in my new book.

Background:

I started this painting process as I do most times – by using sacred palo santo smoke to smudge myself, my space and the canvas.  I then added a drop of blessed water from the Chalice Well in Glastonbury to my spray bottle to wet the canvas (and a dash on myself). It feels great to open myself, the space and the canvas for a whole new creative process.

The background will eventually be quite dark and the figures lighter. At least that’s how I envision it, but I’m going half planned and half intuitively with this painting, so we’ll see what happens.

I started with a very watery mix of white, pearl, interference blue-green, and 4 shades of blue.  Once that was dry, I added a glaze of pearl and 2 interference colours (they shine various colours at various angles).

Cutting Snowflakes:

Using my compass to make circles and a protractor that I printed from an online file to measure the 60 and 120 degree points on a folded circle, I then folded the left corner to the right mark and the right corner to the left mark. Then I folded it again in half.  Then I drew designs and cut them. Unfolding them is so much fun as the results are always a surprise.

Stencils:

I then placed them on the canvas, measuring carefully, and used a sponge to gently tap one shade of blue around them.  Voilà!

Tangle Patterns:

I then added darker circles (-ish… I wasn’t going for precision) to add contrast and spent the rest of the weekend listening to music and painting patterns in various shades of blue, pearl, silver, and interference blue. I have no idea how much of this will show in the final painting, but it was fun.  Here are the final 5 smaller snowflakes.  Click on any image to see it larger.