Rainking – Square One Focus

The square one focus for the week of Nov 11-17 is Rainking by Leona Shih. Stepouts can be found here.

Rainking can be considered a fragment tangle. Fragment tangles are the elements that fill the spaces of a grid. Fragments can be rotated or mirrored to create variations. Rainking reminded me of another tangle, Cornerz by Didier Gervy, that can be rotated and mirrored to create either a very ordered pattern or a more organic meandering pattern. Here’s an example of Cornerz. I drew the same fragment on 16 Biju tiles then laid them out in different ways, all the same orientation in one example and rotated randomly in the other example.

For my Rainking tile I decided to create a more random meandering version.

First I drew a grid with wavy lines to show some movement, and started adding the Rainking fragment randomly.

Here it is with the Rainking covering the tile.

I then drew an aura around the spaces that formed between the Rainking fragments and began filling them in with black. I wanted to cover up some of the grid lines and make the fragments stand out more.

After I got the spaces between filled with black I wondered what it would look like if I shaded each “petal” of Rainking in the opposite direction of the one next to it. I started by adding graphite alternately to the top or bottom of each “petal”. ( I remembered to take photos of the shading in progress for this tile.)

Here is the tile before the final blending.

And here is the finished tile. After blending I went back in and added more shading to the darkest areas.

The final result reminds me of fallen petals after a spring bloom. This was an interesting experiment.

As always if you see something in this post that you’d like to try in your own work please feel free to do so.

Blessings,

Lynn