Saturday, September 3, 2011

David W. - Butterfly Flutter Bells

Butterfly Flutter Bells

It can be fun to be random. Maybe that's why the official Zentangle® kit has the dice and little legend card. I bought myself a couple of 10 sided dice and I have a regular one, so I can go all the way to 100 and really make it random.

Another way to be a little random is to just ask someone. My sister has all sorts of ideas that make me think. This one came from her idea, she asked me to do a butterfly.

The idea of this one is that I'm a tiny little person, like as small as a Lego Minifig. If I were walking around in a little clump of those flowers that grow under the bushes, what would I see. A butterfly could block out the sun. It could send out waves of air like fwup, fwup, fwup. Everything would move because of the butterfly.

First make the butterfly. Just think of drawing a sort of boat shape. Then draw one behind it, but a little longer. Add a stick body and some little antenna. Ta-da! You've got a butterfly from the side. Way easier than a full up butterfly pinned out flat. Who ever sees a butterfly like that outside, anyway? They just look too dead that way.

Then draw your grassy curls and hang the bells. Long curls with a tight turn at the end seem to work out pretty slick. You can let them cross or not. They can come from a clump spot, or not. Jut make them big. If you have some room, you can draw some shorter ones to be in the background.

Then do little upside down tulip shape(just turn the paper upside down) as the flower. Don't connect them . . . you don't need them stuck on the curls, they just float there. I got that idea from a lot of places. The little dot is like the end of the little Pistil in the flower. Some flowers have those hanging way out and they have a little lump on the end. If you hold the flower upside down it looks like a bell clapper.

Waves of air and sunlight. Just draw a spiral around the butterfly while you lift and drop your pen. Then, as an added extra, I did the waves all the way down. They are the air moving the bells. A good trick for making a bigger curve than your space is to put down your pinky fingernail and use it like a pivot. Turn the paper or turn your hand. If you want to make a smaller curve, use the edge of your middle finger right next to the pencil tip as a pivot; for that one you almost have to turn the paper.

The little teeny grass tufts are because I wanted something to make the bell tower grass curls look huge. I wanted to be really really little for this one.

Color,  I colored it. I liked the idea of the sun behind the butterfly being blocked by the butterfly. I thought it would make me (as the looker) smaller. But it just almost has to be yellow, doesn't it? Then blue for the sky to make it clear that the butterfly IS blocking out the sun because the rest of the sky is blue.

Did I get all that in there? Sometimes I wonder if what I see is what other people see.

My sister, Zoe, loves this one. So it's for her. Zoe's Butterfly Flutter Bells. She named it. I wanted to call it, "A walk on the small side." I guess I'll save that name for another one.

David W.

2 comments:

andrea said...

You put so much thought into your art. I love how serene this is.

NightBlooming said...

So beautiful! It reminds me of the sort of plant a fairy would stand under ^_^