snowflake lesson - bonus post

alyce left a question about the snowflake envelope to marti - yes, i started with a mostly dried up zig calligraphy marker. i keep my dry markers because they usually have enough juice to write one name. and the non-dry tip usually has a lot of juice.

i need to experiment with storing them on-end to see if more juice will drift into the downward tip.
and somewhere i read how to refill markers, but i'm pretty sure i will never get around to that.

this is a crayola marker. i thought you might like tips on drawing snowflakes. simple ones, like an asterisk are easy, but anytime i try to fill in other strokes, they seem to be harder to do than one would think. it might be because the real ones are super perfect with the angles.

(1) so, here are my tips. start with a flattened X
(2) add the vertical stroke
(3) put 6 dots to guide the second layer of strokes
(4) make a pointy-u or V shape - and I have to rotate the flake each time to make those angles symmetrical. i am never happy when i just leave the envelope in one position and try to make 12 even lines going in 12 different directions
(5) then add another V at the tip of each stem. again, i have to rotate to get them nice.
(6) shows the whole process with one marker. i did steps 4 and 5 with a g-tec so they would show up better. i like both options.
(7) is with a g-tec and it starts with a circle and an attempt to make 6 nice stems. not that easy
(8) i tried a pencil outline to get the stems all the same length - probably not a bad idea - but requires more patience than i have on a typical day
 (9) started with a brighter tombo that was toned down with  softer pink tombo using both the brush tip and the bullet tip.
(10) shows how bad it looks when you don't get your first X flat enough.
(11) the first X is actually too flat, but it does not bother me the way no. 10 bothers me.
(12) the stem pointing to 4 o'clock was too long, so i evened things out with a three prong set of strokes at the end of each stem.
(13 would probably be OK if it were a little smaller.

getting the weight of the strokes in the right proportion to the size of the snowflake seems to be the trick. snowflakes pack a lot of detail into a very small space.

happy snowflaking

regular sunday post is right below

later - i layered tombo and blurred everything and it looks better to me