Halloween Pokeroot

So this could probably be described as a Poke-Nightmare. I was super happy with my recent discovery of MI2 tangle (see my Renaissance tile here), and decided to incorporate it into the Pokeroot challenge tile for this week. I always like to add a little challenge of my own, and I decided to create a piece where the light would be placed centrally, that is, radiating from the center onto all directions. Not exactly a mandala, but something close to that.

Here is the original line art with a bit of central shading on the MI2:

Learn how to create great shading with Eni Oken's ebooks • enioken.com

Learn how to create great shading with Eni Oken's ebooks • enioken.com

Everything was going really well when suddenly -- DISASTER!!! I RUINED THE BACKGROUND! Oh no!!!!

Oh well, I wasn't going to go down easily, I decided to ink the background and add some white gel pen Munchin, inspired by the Diva's challenge #239:

Learn how to create great shading with Eni Oken's ebooks • enioken.com

Learn how to create great shading with Eni Oken's ebooks • enioken.com

The final piece is here:

Learn how to create great shading with Eni Oken's ebooks • enioken.com

Learn how to create great shading with Eni Oken's ebooks • enioken.com

The image measures 5x5 inches on Bristol Smooth paper, and was made using a variety of different media: inking pen, black and sepia, inking brush pen in black, white gel pen, 2H, H, HB and 6B pencils, white colored pencil, Copic grey markers.

Tangles used were: Pokeroot, Munchin, MI2, Zenith all mixed in with Zentwining.

My self-critique: it took too long and it was definitely NOT ZEN, and therefore I didn't take as much care with the smoothness and direction of the shading as I normally do. I was just tired of it, and wanted to get it done and over, so I used grey marker underglaze to speed things up. This comes with a price, the shading is not as nice as when done with graphite only. The positive side is that I learned quite a bit from it: inking park of a piece is a good solution when you mess up seriously!

Copyright 2015 Eni Oken