ZENDALA DARE #77 No. 2 + MURPHY'S LAW

You all know how these sort of days go... if it can go wrong, it WILL go wrong.

Well, I've been having a whole week like that - at least as far as The Bright Owl's Zendala Dare #77 is concerned.  See, I love this template.  Love it.  LOVE IT LOVE IT LOVE IT.  My first go took like 25 minutes & was just something for fun, but my jittery hands kept me from doing anything even close to serious with it.

I recently found a flickr page full of tangles by Neil Burley.  Holy rollin moly, how good is he?!?!  I have a deep, ingrained love for the Craftsman, Art Nouveau, Art Deco & Organic Modernism movements, & he has created quite a few tangles that just seem to sing to me.  I found his Deco Star pattern first, & I knew that I was going to use it for dare #77.  Then everything just went wrong wrong wrong & I made things terribly over difficult trying to get perfection.

Art Deco isn't forgiving.  The straight lines are perfectly straight, the curves & circles have perfect proportions & the angles are razor sharp.  I drew this over & over & over & over again trying to get that perfection; resorted to using rulers (!) & a compass (!!) & a drafting circle template (!!!) & a 30-60-90 drafting triangle (!!!!)  & I STILL COULDN'T GET IT RIGHT! 

I'm telling you... Murphy's Law...

SO, I eventually had to just make myself finish.  & I have 5 copies exact same thing.  I left one b&w, then colored the rest in a sort of theme-like way.

DECOdala - tangles used: DECOSTAR, co2

 

DECOdala -New York

 

DECOdala - Hollywood

DECOdala - South West

DECOdala - Miami

 I've studied Art Deco quite a bit, & it's always stood out to me how different the colors used by different regions in the country were.  These are the color schemes that I seem to associate with each of these areas.  The most classical stuff always came from NY, Hollywood Deco to me doesn't seem to use as much gold as silver, & the more modern blue/blue-green/green's are prevalent.  The South West imbued their Deco with the colors of the desert, & the great, cutting-edge hot spot of the deco movement, Miami, was splashed with bright pastels & neon lights.

I had far more fun coloring these than I did drawing them.