Chinese New Year

Happy New Year! That is - the Chinese New Year, the year of the goat. 

When the Diva asked us to try a tile inspired by The Goat my first reaction was HUH??? I am not Chinese and have almost no experience with Chinese culture so I need to do quite a bit of research in the internet. Thankfully, when you type in Chinese New Year and ask for images, there is a plethora of images that come up. There were MANY options to inspire me.

I looked at all the goat pictures but I wanted to stay more to the Zentangle philosophy of non-representational. I saw one picture that used a goat's horn instead of the 0 for the numbers 2015. Bingo! A goats horn, repeated and used as a pattern would be my connection. 

There were many pictures that used the color combination red and yellow so off I went to my stash of colored tiles. I didn't have a red one! So I had to make a new one and I realized why I didn't have one. I had to do many layers of red watercolor paint before it showed up as red instead of pink.

The yellow is done with a Sakura moonlight gelly roll pen. I found the meander line around the edge is used just as much in Chinese design as is is in Greek Key design. 'Bumps' worked well as my fill pattern. The horns are done with the Moonlight gelly roll pen and a gold metallic gelly roll pen. I added a little glitter pen too. Unfortunately the gold doesn't show up quite as well in the picture as it does in person.

Oh, and the glow in the middle was a couple of layers of yellow and orange chalk pencils.