"The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls."
Pablo Picasso
I've been working on a few more of my Zenduo pieces and have three to share with you today. If you missed my post about my challenge to myself, you can read it here to understand what I'm talking about.
My third Zenduo incorporates the tangle patterns Amalea by Chrissie Frampton and Angel Fish by Marizaan. I chose to do this one on gray-toned paper by Strathmore.
It looked kind of unfinished, but not after adding some graphite shading along with white pastel pencil and gelly roll highlighting. I love the way this glows.
My next two patterns are Ansu from Lori Manoogian and Antidots from Anita Roby-Lavery. They are similar patterns so they were easy to combine. A little blackening and a little graying the background with pencil and voila!
The last one for today was done on one of my colored tiles. Sorry, but I don't have a picture of the tile before the tangling. The two patterns here are Aquafleur from Rick and Maria, and Arc Flower by JJ LaBarbera.
They were all fun pieces to create and I'm pretty happy with the way they turned out. I'm a little more worried about the next combination I have to do, but you'll have to come back for that another time.
"A dynamic duo who work well together can be worth any three people working in isolation." Larry Constantine
The Diva's challenge this past week was a duotangle. Just like in the challenge I've made for myself that I'm calling Zenduos (see my last blog post), that means you use two and only two patterns. The two patterns to use were Paradox and Bunzo, both on my list of favorites.
The first tile I did in the traditional black and white. I drew in a totally random manor, no thinking. And when it was finished I added the black in the background for some drama.
Then I tangled another one, where I penciled in a box as my string to contain the Paradox. I chose one of my colored tiles for this one, and here you can see the tile before and after tangling.
Watch for another post pretty soon with the next two of my Zenduo tiles!
"Miracles sometimes come in pairs." Unknown
I've decided to undertake a little Zentangle adventure. No, let me restate that... a BIG Zentangle adventure. I'll explain. I use Evernote to catalog all of the pattern step-outs that I like. I find it's a great system where I can search for a particular pattern, I can tag them with descriptive words, I can order them in different ways. Right now I have 343 patterns in my Evernote "notebook." Most of them I have used and love, or at least like enough to want to use again. However, there are a fair number that I've added to my list but haven't tried yet for whatever reason.
So... I've decided to start at the beginning (in alphabetical order) and I'm going to tangle using two at a time. The first pair, then the next, and on and on for all 343 patterns (which is an odd number, but by the time I get through them all I'm sure I will have added some more.) No more than two at a time, but embellishments will be allowed. I enjoy using just two tangles at a time so that it doesn't get too busy looking. The challenge will be somehow making the two work together even when I would never in a million years think of pairing them up. Some will be easy and others not so much.
The other challenge will be seeing this adventure to the end and making it through all 343+ patterns before giving up. That's more than 170 tiles/ZIAs. I'm not going to pressure myself to do one every day, or even every other day, so this could turn into a very l-o-n-g adventure. I've decided to call the pieces I create Zenduos and will refer to this as my Zenduo adventure.
So without further ado, I present to you my first two Zenduos. Here is the first tile before I tangled it, a background I made with Dylusion paints.
The first two patterns in my collection are 4 corners (numbers come before letters in alpha order) and Abeko.
Here's the tile after I added a little pencil shading.
For the next one I chose to work on a black tile, which I don't do very often. The next two patterns were African Artist and All Boxed Up. Lots of lines in this one. And some shading with the zenstone. Not too happy with my African Artist here, as I can never seem to get the squinched parts to look right. One thing this project will do for me is help to weed out the patterns that I don't like enough... or can't do well enough... to keep them in my collection. This may be one of them.
So there you have it, my first two Zenduos. Anyone out there want to challenge themselves to go on a similar adventure with me?
"Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment." Claude Monet
I am so happy to announce that my Etsy shop is fully open once again after a long time of intermittent closures. And except for the week of Thanksgiving, it should stay open consistently. I hope. To celebrate the re-opening, I am offering a discount on all purchases for a short time, but you'll have to read, or at least scroll down, to the end of my post to get the coupon code for your discount.
I'm sharing lots of photos here of work that I've completed on my hand-colored tiles, showing them both before and after tangling. I love the colors in this first one and love doing lots of line work.
The next one has lots more line work, on a totally different type of background.
I also have a collection of what I call geometric tiles, and this one is part of that collection.
Another series I call pathway tiles. These are created with alcohol inks, just like all the tiles are, but using a special method that creates what looks like paths to me. I have them in both gray and colored. This one is an example of one of the grays.
Here's an example of one of the colored Zendala tiles.
This one has some of my favorite colors in a little bit of a swirl.
And another Zendala, this one with a rippled effect.
I completed this last tile a while ago, but it's one of my favorites, both in the colors and the tangling, so here it is again. It's an example of one of the colored pathway tiles, similar to the gray one above.
In addition to colored tiles, gray tiles, Zendalas, and geometric tiles, I've created a line of digital papers using alcohol ink backgrounds. They're available with lines for writing or unlined for an unlimited number of different uses. Please take a look at them while you're over in my Etsy shop perusing the various tiles. Here are just a few examples of the papers that you'll find.
And for those of you who stuck with me all the way to the end of this long post, you can get 10% off any order between now and November 15th. Just enter the coupon code FALL17 when you check out.
"I never met a color I didn't like." Dale Chihuly
A while back I downloaded a number of stock images online. I've tangled some of them, but others have been sitting around for a really long time. Here's one I decided to pull out and tackle today.
I love the bright colors in it and thought it would look nice if I used colored Microns to tangle this. I don't often use the colored pens, but there was one to match each of the colors (except yellow) in this design and I figured it was a great idea. A gray Copic multiliner was used to tangle those circles clinging to the outside of the big circle.
I really liked the way this was going until I got to the last part (isn't that the way it always goes?) which was the blue penned part in the top green circles. Definitely not my favorite part of this piece.
The shading was done with my pastel pencils, which I have in all the colors to match the pen colors. If I could cut out the top part of this I would be really happy with it!
"No one can drive us crazy unless we give them the keys."
Douglas Horton
The Diva's challenge this week is to use the pattern Crazy 'Nzeppel. It's a variation of plain old 'Nzeppel which is a grid based tangle. The crazy variety is based on random lines rather than a grid. I've always called it Random 'Nzeppel and am not really sure when it got the crazy label.
Anyway, I used one of my colored tiles as shown here.
I started by tangling 'Nzeppel, then added Clob and a few bits of Tipple.
At this point I wasn't too sure that I liked it, but ah! The magic of shading!
Now I like it much better. I could have done the shading in color to go with the colored tile. And I probably would have, except for the fact that I don't have my preferred supplies for color shading (pastel pencils) with me right now. So I went with plain old graphite, which worked out pretty well.
"Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous." Bill Moyers
Way back in May I realized it had been a really long time since I had worked on a Ben Kwok template. So I decided to do one of his mandalas. But then began my crazy summer, and it wasn't until last week that I got back to this zendala that was started so long ago.
Here is a picture of Ben's template that I began with.
A few lines were left out so that I wouldn't have spaces that were too tiny to tangle. Here's what it looked like after I finished tangling.
I began shading but paused after the center area was done so I could share the half shaded zendala with you. It's always so interesting to see the difference a bit of graphite can make.
Then I completed the shading, which took quite some time, and here's the final zendala.
Not bad, but I have to admit that after having this one laying around for so long I'm looking forward to moving on to something else!
"Unsuccessful people are busy being busy. Successful people are busy being productive." Kevin Abdulrahman
I'm back after a very long and busy month. In that time we packed, moved out of our house and into storage, traveled to Fl, back to NC for a couple of weeks, back to SC to move out of storage into our new home, unpacked and organized... and I'm exhausted! Needless to say there wasn't much time for tangling in all that, and I didn't always have access to my Zentangle supplies. But I'm finally back to a little bit of normalcy, which means finally some tangling time.
A while ago dingbatz were introduced in the world of Zentangle. I hope you've heard about/seen them, because I can't explain them well as I don't know that I fully understand them. Here is the first one that I attempted... a small frame-like thing divided into sections by a tangle pattern that extends outside the frame. For my first try it wasn't too bad, but I felt something didn't look right. Then I figured it out... my Mooka that creates the sections all goes under the frame, and I think some should go above and some below. Oh well.
Next I tried one on a colored tile (which I sell in my Etsy shop, although the tiles won't be available for about 2 more weeks until everything gets settled in here). Here's the tile before tangling.
And here is my dingbatz. Unfortunately it wasn't until after I did this one that the over/under bit occurred to me.
Then I added some shading.
It's okay, but still not exciting me. So on to another one. This time I used Hollibaugh to divide it into sections, and remembered to make some of it go under the frame and some of it over. I added lots of auras which are always fun.
Then I shaded, added a little more black, and an outside border.
I like this one better than the others, although I think the style kind of got further away from the "traditional" dingbatz that I've seen everyone creating. But that's okay, because I should have my own style, right?
So, back to the drawing board! Here I used some large Flux to create the sections. Definitely my own style again!
Added shading to some of it with graphite.
And added color to the rest of it with pastel pencils.
This one is definitely my favorite. Whether or not it embodies the original intent of dingbatz... I just don't know!
"Flowers are like friends; they bring color to your world." Unknown
I decided it was time again to combine my two favorite things to do, Zentangle and photography. I've blogged about this before, once in 2016, which you can see here, and once in 2015, which you can see here. I again chose a photo of flowers to tangle since that's one of my favorite subjects for photography.
Here is the photo before any tangling.
I printed the photo on mixed media paper so that I could tangle using my Microns. In the past I've printed them on glossy photo paper which meant that I had to tangle using a Microperm pen because of the slick surface. Not my favorite surface to tangle on.
First I tangled the petals of the two flowers using Angel Fish on one and Maryhill on the other. For the bottom layer of petals I tangled Dyon.
Then I used a gray pen to add some Printemps to the Dyon.
I wanted to add color and shading using some other medium besides pastel pencils which is my usual go to method. Watercolor pencils is what I decided on. I could have used a water brush to blend, but I never feel like I have the control I'd like with a water brush. So I tried a Copic colorless blender pen. I didn't really think it was going to work since Copics are alcohol based, but to my surprise it worked great. With the pointed tip of the blender pen I could control it easily and get into tight spaces.
After adding color, a few shades of pinks and purples on the upper petals, I decided to use some green on the bottom petals to transform them into leaves instead of petals. Some graphite shading was also added to those leaves. And some white gelly roll pen accents in the centers of the flowers.
As one last finishing touch, I added some white pastel pencil (couldn't resist!) highlights on the leaves... can you see the difference?
It was a fun little project. Using photos to tangle is an easy way to have instant color and a ready made string.
