"Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it."
Robert Motherwell
Happy New Year one and all! Hope you are having a great start to 2018. Here in the Charleston, SC area we had 5 inches of snow (on top of a layer of ice)! A very rare occurrence, and since there are no plows here, we just sit and wait for it to disappear on its own. So I've been stuck in the house with lots of time for tangling.
I'm here with the 6th Zenduo in my series. It's been a while since I did one because I got sidetracked and have been spending a lot of time on another Zentangle project. I hope to be able to share that with you in the next week or so. The next two patterns in my collection are Archer by Christine Gerstner and Arukas, a pattern from Zentangle headquarters. I used an official Zentangle tile with a black Micron PN pen. Here is what it looked like before shading.
I drew Archer inside some of the rings of Arukas. I'm not really loving it, but as always, it looks better after shading.
I wrote 2018 for the first time when I signed the tile. It will take a while getting used to it!
Once I finish the other project I'm working on, I hope to move a little quicker with my Zenduo series. If you missed my original post about what I'm doing, you can read it here.
Until next time...
"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.
