Playing Catch Up

"The only way to have a life is to commit to it like crazy."   Angelina Jolie

Time has been slipping away from me lately. I've got my hand in so many Zentangle pots that I'm having a hard time keeping up with them all. There's my blog, my FB journal group, Square One FB group, the Diva's challenge, my tangle*a*day calendar, the zendala dare, making a tile to swap at Tangle U (a retreat for CZTs in Santa Fe next month), mass production of my hand-colored tiles that I will be selling at Tangle U, preparing for the classes I teach....did I forget anything? 

Oh yes... I plan to start sending out a newsletter once or twice a month, and I'm trying to get the first one out this week. It will include information about my upcoming classes, links to websites/videos/articles that might be of interest to tanglers, info on Zentangle products, etc., etc., etc. If you are not already on my email list but would like to receive my newsletters, just scroll down the right side of my blog and enter your information where it says "Subscribe to the Tangle Mania Newsletter."

So, with all of that going on I have missed completing the last two zendala dares. So here they are, better late than never. I'll go backwards. Here's the latest template, #99.

And here's my black and white version. 

I would have added shading, but instead of doing that I wanted to add color. I decided to try a watercolor pencil on this, but am not too happy with it. Love my Tombow brush markers more.

Here is the template for the #98 dare.

Using a tan Renaissance tile with black and brown Micron pens, here's what I came up with.

But with the Renaissance tiles the real magic comes with the shading and highlighting. I used a brown colored pencil and graphite pencil for shading, and a white charcoal pencil for highlights. Now it really pops.

Okay - at least I'm caught up in one thing! Ready to tackle something else. Where to begin?

Gray Matter

"Life is about the gray areas. Things are seldom black and white, even when we wish they were and think they should be..."   
Emily Giffin

It's been a long while since I tangled in my toned paper sketchbooks, so I decided to pull out the gray paper. I always love the way the black pen looks on the paper with white highlights. For my first ZIA I decided to go organic. If anyone knows the name and creator of the main leafy tangle here, please let me know. I have the pattern in my collection, but never knew who to credit. I added some Printemps and B'Dylan to the unnamed pattern, then drew highlights with a combination of white charcoal pencil and white Prismacolor pencil. A little bit of graphite shading and voila! I was VERY happy with the completed piece.

I started this second one with some Tripoli. I could never get the hang of Tripoli until we did an exercise with it at Tangle U last spring. Now I'm okay with it as long as I don't get stressed over the fact that they don't all come out perfectly even and lined up. As a matter of fact, I made a "mistake" in my Tripoli, so I repeated the "mistake" so it wouldn't be the only one. Since Tripoli is all triangles, I decided to stay with the triangle theme, adding some Fassett by Lynn Mead, and Z-Trik by Yamit Fridman, both of which are based on triangles. Again I used the white pencils for highlights and graphite for shading to finish it off.

The white makes the patterns really pop on the toned papers. I must remember to pull out these sketchbooks more often!

Uncorked

"Enthusiasm just creates bubbles; it doesn't keep them from popping."   Adora Svitak

Another challenge! Sometimes it's hard to keep up with them all. Well actually I don't. I choose the ones that appeal to me most, usually because of the tangle(s) involved, and then hope that I have time to do them. This week's It's a String Thing challenge (hosted by Adele Bruno, CZT, of Tickled to Tangle) was to use her own pattern Uncorked, in her own string (#62 from Tangle Patterns). Here's a picture of the string.




And here's a link to the pattern Uncorked.

I had not used Uncorked before, but it looked like it would be fun, and boy was it ever! It really began to flow and take on a life of its own, and started to burst out of the bubbles. So much so that you can't see the string at all. But I did start with the string...I promise.

Next I tried it on a black Zendala tile. This time I didn't even try to use a string. I started with four enclosed bubbles in the middle and let it burst forth from there. I drew this with my Sakura metallic gelly roll pens in copper and silver. Then I added some pink tipple, also a metallic gelly roll. Those metallic pens are beautiful on black. I thought that the pink might have been a drop too bright with the other colors, so I toned it down just a bit by using some white charcoal pencil right on top of the pink. I also used the white pencil to shade the rest of the Zendala.

Uncorked does seem like a fitting name for this tangle pattern, at least for the way I interpreted it. It's as if a bottle was uncorked and out flowed the design.