Posts in 2024
Rusty Balloon Pop-up

I'm playing with several things lately: learning how to make popup cards, how to paint and shade using ink and watercolors, and how to use my new inkjet printer. Here I duplicated a balloon shape originally drawn with brown pen and inks, then printed out several pieces to collage on a V-fold pop-up card. The result is an explosion!!!

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Be Well 2024 Final Pop-up

I participated in the 2024 Zentangle BeWell event. Instead of using triangular tiles, I created a white base pop-up card using almost exclusively triangular V-folds and added each tangle of the event every day. The main challenge of this project was to make something that would flatten out completely so that I can draw over it after the pop-up is constructed. Here’s the final piece!

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2024Eni Okenpopup, bewell
Tagh String

Another Art Raffle pulled out by some friends May 23 2024 - I made a few alterations and switched a few cards. I used Tagh (Zentangle) as a string and then spherified the other tangles. I used Crease (Sam Taylor), Gust, Tagh and Quabog (Zentangle). The raffle also asked to use Decorative Borders which I happily obliged. The challenge here was in the shading: I used only brown and sanguine ink, no pencils at all.

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Be Well 2024 White Base Pop-up

I'm participating in the Zentangle BeWell2024 event. Instead of using triangular tiles, I created these white base pop-up cards using almost exclusively triangular V-folds, one tangle a day on each v-fold. I made two cards. The main challenge of this project was to make something that would flatten out completely so that I can draw over it after the pop-up is constructed. The videos of the cards can be seen on my blog.

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Twing Jaysix Bud Exercise

A few weeks ago some friends pulled out an Art Raffle and I used some of the tangles in that raffle as inspiration to create a “bud” exercise. I used Twing (Zentangle), Jaysix (my own), Fescurus Verae (Veronica Vazquez Orozco) combined into a bud. I'm pretty pleased with it. Shading was done partially with watercolors and partially using Procreate.

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Flowers with Stem Popup

One more Flower Pop-up card. I guess it was the recent Mother's day that prompted me to create so many flower cards. I'm not quite done with them yet. I created a mockup of the card first to see if the mechanism would work the way I wanted. The decoration is a mix of Mooka, Diva Dance and Tipple.

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Twisted Flower Popup

Another super weird pop-up! Here I used a twisting mechanism, which rotates 90 degrees as the card opens and closes. On top of that I added a number of add-ons and the result is pretty crazy! Tangles are Twing, Crescent Moon, Printemps (all Zentangle) and also Fescurus Verae (Veronica Vazquez Orozco) and some other things that don't have names.

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Asymmetric Flower Popup

I’ve been away on a family reunion, during which I barely had any time to draw. Here is one piece, though, that I managed to make during this time. The challenge was to create an asymmetric pop-up composition using mostly V-folds. Not sure it’s my favorite composition for pop-ups, but it was fun to see how it came along in a very unusual way.

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Pop-up Mechanism Booklet

Continuing my latest obsession with pop-ups, watching a ton of videos on different mechanisms, my goal is to understand the differences well enough so that I can create pieces intuitively using Zentangle patterns. Many thanks to fantastic paper engineers that post instructional videos online such as Duncan Birmingham and Matthew Reinhart.

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2024Eni Okenpopup, nik, cadent, mooka