Shading

Shading or not? As in other questions about zentangle there is no right or wrong. A light shading is very often making big difference. A heavier shading can make a very dramatic difference. I didn´t care too much about shading when I started tangling. It takes more time if I want to work with shading. One can work with light and shadow in other ways, and get contrast by chosing tangles that matches. But it is a great tool to use shading to make the tangles "pop-out", to get a 3D-effect. Nowadays I hardly manage without that. I use a pencil 2B most of the time, sometimes I also use 6B, but only where I want the darkest corner or lineshadow. I am talking about black on white tiles. There are black tiles and renaissance-tiles as well and working on black surfaces there are other ways to go.  

Today I managed to take one photo before shading and one after. Most of the time I don´t do that, because I forget about it. But I find it developing to see the tile I worked on before and after. So here it is.

As I worked on the shading I also found that I wanted a border, so that came later. This is a crowded tile. No open spaces. But that´s the way it went today. Patterns: Snail (Sayantika Ray), Ping (Yu. Ru Chen), Discolea (Tina Akua Hunziker), Ta-Da (Margaret McKerrihan) and Kassandra (my own pattern). I used string 99.