Primary Colors. Or are they?

Red, yellow, blue, yes? 

Ahh, not so fast! 

That works for paint or colored pencils or ink. Red, yellow and blue are 'primary' because they're the first - or essential - colors. These are the colors from which all other colors can be mixed. You can’t mix a primary color using other colors.

 
Light, however, is different. With light the primary colors are red, green, and blue. You may recall pictures of very close-up TV screens and the red, green and blue dots or bars which compose the images. This is because colored light transmits colors, and colored matter absorbs and reflects colors, so mixing them requires different methods. 

If you take a variety of paint colors and mix them you'll get a muddy brown. If you mix all the colors of light, the result is white light. A prism (I love them!) breaks the white light of the sun into the separate colors of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple.

It’s yet another story when dealing with printing, where the primary colors are cyan, magenta and yellow. If you have a color printer you probably know that. They are similar to, but certainly different from, blue, red and yellow. Have you heard of CMYK? That’s Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and the K is for Black.

Back to the paint, ink, and colored pencils briefly. Here's today's art tip: Have you ever wondered what to do if you need brown? Mix orange and green, or really "red and yellow" and "yellow and blue".

Tile fail!

Linda Farmer, who maintains the Tangle Patterns site, recently issued her own zentangle challenge: to tangle your name. No, not what you might think. The idea is to find tangle patterns beginning with the letters of your name and do a tile with those patterns. I planned to use:
Meer
Avreal
Raddox
Gneiss
Amaze
Rain
Ennies
Tortuca

I began with a border and string. The string was in the shape of an "M". I needed 8 sections for all the letters so I divided it in half horizontally. It soon became evident that I can't count. I had 10 sections. How did that happen? Maybe I could include my middle and last initials? I considered leaving two sections empty. I was obviously off to a good start.

Half of the tangles I'd never done before. I flubbed Avreal by putting the lines going the wrong way. In Gneiss I somehow got an odd number of sections, which is unworkable. I wasn't too pleased with Tortuca either. Fortunately, Amaze is hard to botch.

"B" for Bremner. Also for Bronx Cheer. A very appropriate tangle to include! This tile was going off the rails so I thought I might as well blow up the track. The raspberries would to be red, glued on, and they would hide some of the flubbed parts. This was starting to be fun instead of disappointing.

I retrieved some grocery flyers from the recycle bin and looked for raspberries. Of course, it's not raspberry season. No raspberries to be found. I'd have to make do with trimmed, imported strawberries. I added stems. I did my initials large. And now, presenting... my name tangle tile fail!

I had to take another shot at it. I planned better and had eight sections to fill. I used the same tangles. In the end, I like Amaze and Avreal is okay. Gneiss is indeed nice, and bold, and I will use it more. I've really liked Raddox for a while, and I teach it but rarely use it. Maybe it will show up more frequently now. Still not big on Tortuca. Here's the MARGARET tile that passed:

More fun with blind strings

I really enjoyed Laura Harms' challenge to do a zentangle tile having done the string with your eyes shut. For one thing, it sometimes creates wobbly lines to work with. I also find that it usually places the string off-center - and occasionally off the page! That was the part I liked best. It sent me right over the edge! :-)

It reminded me of when the technology of photography arrived on the scene and artists started playing with it. It produced some interesting compositions with off-center subjects. Sometimes the subjects were only partly in the picture. Sometimes the images were even blurry. It gave painters a whole cartload of new things to think about! Gustave Caillebotte, a French painter working in the late 1800's, is one artist who was quite taken by this new way of conceiving the picture plane. Here are two of his paintings.

"The Oarsmen", 1877

"On the Pont de l'Europe" 1876-77, Kimbell Art Foundation, Fort Worth, USA

It looks perfectly ordinary to us now, but 140 years ago it was quite bizarre.

Okay, so coming back off that tangent, here are some of the blind string tiles I've done recently, admittedly much less impressive than Caillebotte's paintings.

with Zedbra and droplets

This tile includes a tangle pattern concocted by myself and Laura Harms, CZT, also in Saskatoon. It's along the left edge and it's called Zedbra.

Laura said about Zedbra: "...it was created by Margaret, but named by me... it's a little inside joke.  Margaret and I are both Canadian and in Canada "Z"s are pronounced zed not zee..."

Click here to see one of Laura's tiles (from her weekly zentangle challenge number 2) using Zedbra including highlights along the middle.

I'll post a how-to page on Zedbra soon (although you can probably figure it out yourself).

 This tile
includes a pattern
I discovered recently on
stART's blog. There are two
bold  stripey edges in this tile,
and two delicate rolling edges.
The delicate tangle is called
Organza Pleated Ruffle
and was designed
by Ruth Howell,
a friend
of stART's.
Ruth's tangle has dots
around  the curved parts,
so perhaps this is a tangleation!?
It works nicely with Lilypads.

DIAMOND PANES tangle instructions

I bought a book of bargello needlework patterns for cheap from the library's clear-out bin. Bargello seems to be a bit like needlepoint except the stitches are longer and go up and down on the canvas instead of diagonally. There were some good ideas in there. One, called Diamond Panes, was easily adaptable to drawing although step two is a little tricky. Here's how it goes:

 

Here are a couple of tiles using Diamond Panes. 

In the first one the tangle ends up on its side.

Diamond Panes, Betweed, Florz, Flux, Umble

Diamond Panes, Cubine, Flux, Tipple, Xyp

Saskatoon in January

For my readers in different climates, I thought you might like to see some pictures of Saskatoon in mid-winter. These were taken on January 19th, 2011. There was a cloudless sky and a full moon. It must have been the middle of the night because the temperature was -33C with a windchill of -43C. We have a river through the middle of the city and these were taken from the east riverbank looking west across the river.

I like to give credit where credit is due and asked the person who sent me the photos if she could identify the photographer. She e-mailed her source who e-mailed... you get the picture. BD told EC who told my friend MH to "Just use it!" At some point someone provided this information: "Those pictures came from a former city policeman - I emailed back to ask who took them - if it was him & all he emailed back was 'would I lie?' -  & he is a jokester, so I really don't know who needs credit."

UPDATE, 2014 August 7 : these fabulous photos were taken by Bruce A. Johnson. You can see more of his work here.

The "fog" you see is vapor rising from the river and from various heating systems.

Looking at part of the downtown section of Saskatoon from across the South Saskatchewan River.

The Bessborough Hotel, the grande dame of local hotels, a castle on the prairies.

Ixorus

This week, a new tangle appeared in the skies over Planet Zentangle. It has been named Ixorus and is well-suited for tangleation. (for what?) You can read all about it in the Zentangle newsletter.  So smart Laura (the diva), knowing that we'd all be wanting to try it out anyway, proposed Ixorus as this week's zentangle challenge. I did two or three tiles before I had one I liked.

The first one seemed to be suffering from residual Orb-itude:

Then I seemed to get a handle on the design. I tried it various ways. Here's the one I like best. I like the black dots on the bottom edge finishing off those stray lines.

Tibetan sand mandalas

If you've ever seen a real-life Tibetan Buddhist sand mandala I'm sure you were as impressed as I was. For me the truly amazing aspect is that they don't use any glue! The mandalas are large - about a meter across - and take days to construct. That's a LOT of loose sand! Don't dare bump the board it's on, or sneeze, or turn on a fan.

Photo courtesy of 'henryart' at creativecomons.org

I've had the privilege of seeing three being constructed. It's amazing to watch the monks at work. I discovered an interesting time-lapse video of one that took six days to complete. The whole thing comes together in about two minutes and the video is very interesting. One gets a much better idea of the process - and I think it's even more impressive - to stop by day after day to watch a mandala like this take shape slowly, as it must. It's interesting to be in the atmosphere of the monks' care and focused attention, although they are also friendly, smiling, and open to chat and explain. Then finally, once all that careful work is done, to watch it all being swept together.

Here's another video that's mostly sand mandalas. The sound track is by Phyllis Cole-Dai, an American pianist and composer. The music is lovely, as are the sentiments expressed, but what makes this video particularly special for me is that my painting "Whiz Bang" appears in it! It shows up near the end, just after the seven minute mark, and lasts about half a minute.

WHIZ BANG (c) 1995 Margaret Bremner; 24" square.

While mainly done in acrylic paint Whiz Bang does contain a few sections of colored sand. But I used glue! There is also a filigree gold-colored metal disk in the center. If I had to choose a dozen masterpieces of my work, this would be one of them.