Wonderful Words for a Wednesday

And more Zentangle® love...

Original Illustration by Sue Agnew   

Sue Agnew, a regular contributor to "It's a String Thing" weekly challenges, sent this beautiful piece when I began  posting Zentangle® inspired art (ZIA) in anticipation of Valentine's Day.

It contains a line from her grandmother's favorite poem - the whole of which I include at the end of this post.

As I studied Sue's delicate artwork, I was intrigued by the way she integrated hearts into existing tangle patterns.

When asked about it, she has graciously explained how she chose the patterns to adjust with heart shapes - as well as her thought process.

I post it here (edited with her permission) because I am certain many of us will benefit from her expertise and apply it to our artwork - with grateful hearts, of course!

Sue writes:

... the organization PaperWorks has a postcard exchange each summer where we send postcards to a secret pal. A couple of summers ago I decided to use my grandmother's favorite poem. The first card I used four colors of watercolor pencils to write the first two lines ("the day will bring some lovely thing, I say it over each new dawn") and then painted over with water so you could see words but not read them -- and when I sent my sister a scan of it she commented on how I'd used "dawn" colors. So that made me realize that each card needed to be illustrated in a way specific to the words in it. I wanted to do a Zentangle, and I thought it would be fun to use hearts and heart-related patterns to illustrate the two lines "some gay, adventurous thing to hold against my heart when it is gone."
...I don't think there were as many heart-related tangles as there are now, and many of them are border tangles rather than fillers. So I just kind of looked at other tangles to see if they had heart-ish components.

I originally outlined a simple string with Heartvine, but decided I wanted to use a heart-shaped string and decided Heartvine would be too complicated to bend into a heart shape...so I ended up using heart-shaped pearls for the string.
I also tried using Socc (one of my favorites) with heart-shaped shapes but didn't particularly like it. I experimented with Flukes using heart shapes and auras instead of squares, but in the final piece I ended up using Flukes (bottom left corner) but with square lines instead of heart-shaped lines.
I also tried Dex (another one of my favorites) with a light-colored heart reversed out of a dark inner square, but in the final piece I liked it better with just a darkened heart shape in the inner square.
Other than that, I thought Footlites (at right) looked cool using a half-heart instead of a half-circle, I was pleased with how Squill (left) looked with hearts rather than half-ovals, and the other tangle (at top) is based on Rosé, which is made of heart shapes.

This was her grandmother's favorite poem:

The Day Will Bring Some Lovely Thing ~

by Grace Noll Crowell

The day will bring some lovely thing,

I say it over each new dawn,

Some gay, adventurous thing to hold

Against my heart when it is gone,

And so I rise and go to meet

The day with wings upon my feet.

I come upon it unaware,

Some sudden beauty without name,

A snatch of song, a breath of pine,

A poem lit with golden flame - 

High tangled bird notes keenly thinned

Like flying color on the wind.

No day has ever failed me, quite

Before the grayest day is done,

I come upon some misty bloom,

Or a late line of crimson sun.

Each night I pause, remembering,

Some gay, adventurous, lovely thing.

Thank you so very much Sue!