Space

When I was choosing what shape to draw for my zentangle value strip, I decided to do a hummingbird because it has a special meaning to me and my family. My family and I go camping each summer in Rangely, and there is this little store there that we go to that has necklaces with animals on them and I get one every summer. When I was really young I got one with a hummingbird on it and it is one of the few animal necklaces I haven't lost. Drawing my hand was really hard, I continuously wanted to draw each little detail and every little crease and imperfection of my fingers but had to resist. Also, it was hard not to draw a line where the leaves overlapped, or draw ridges on the leaves instead of leaving them white like you are supposed to so I had to do some erasing.

For my zentangle value strip of a hummingbird, I used a black sharpie gel pen with a .5 tip on drawing paper. I had to push harder or lighter to make the different patterns on the hummingbird and make more lines or fewer lines in certain places to show the contrast of all 10 sections. To create my negative space hands piece I used a couple of different kinds of graphite pencils. I used a 4H pencil to sketch out each outline, a 2H pencil to define the outlines I was going to keep, and a 4B pencil to shade in the negative space. I started out by making a grid on my paper for my negative space leaves drawing using a 2H graphite pencil so I could get a better estimate of where each leaf would go. I then used that same graphite pencil to sketch out the outlines of all five leaves leaving the negative space and not shading it. I outlined the final sketch of the leaves and the border with a black sharpie gel pen. For the color around the leaves, I used many different colors of colored pencils to mix and create variations of colors. “Dark cadmium yellow, orange glaze, pale geranium lake red, fuchsia, crimson, light magenta, violet, ultramarine blue, cobalt turquoise, earth green, and raw umber” are all the colors I used. 

I almost chose to do a wolf for my zentangle value strip instead of a hummingbird because that is also one of the necklaces I haven't lost but then I saw the hummingbird. It just caught my eye and stood out to me more than the wolf did. I wanted to draw my hand in the rock ‘n’ roll position but I tried and it didn't look like it was the rock ‘n’ roll position but just a messed-up hand, so I drew my hand in some simpler positions that still showed the negative space well. Negative space leaves were really tricky, I wanted to do something elaborate and complex but I couldn’t think of anything that was interesting and that I was capable of completing and having the outlook be well done and distinguishable, so I chose to shade with a variety of colored pencils.