A blog about my zentangles, zentangle inspired art, and other artistic pursuits. In the Chicago area.
I've been playing with baby toys this week so this tile seemed appropriate. It was fun to find as many patterns as I could to add to the balls. Have a good weekend!
A blog about my zentangles, zentangle inspired art, and other artistic pursuits. In the Chicago area.
Click on any pattern to enlarge (or follow the links to the original posts) Adeline adeline instructions Zhostovo Border ...
A blog about my zentangles, zentangle inspired art, and other artistic pursuits. In the Chicago area.
Ditto is a tangle pattern I deconstructed after seeing a picture of art deco wallpaper on Pinterest. It has been posted previously but I was playing around with it the other day and had fun coming up with tangleations for it. I show it here in a row that would be perfect for a border but rows can be easily be combined for a fill pattern. Fill inside the 'fish/comma' shapes or fill around the shapes. Shade within the shapes for a different effect. And notice all the different tangleations. They can all be used as tangleations on other tangle patterns. This picture is shown vertically because I think it's easier to draw the tangle if you go up in a stairstep/zigzag manner. Remember when you are drawing zentangle patterns, ROTATE your tile or paper so that the tangle is comfortable to draw. I love these last tangleations that play with the basic shape of the 'fish'. And then you can totally go outside of the parallel lines and fill a variety of sections on your tile. It's OK to adapt the number of little 'fish' to fit your section. I made a video of how to draw Ditto that is posted on You Tube. If the link above doesn't work try clicking here. If you want more inspiration on tangleations I highly recommend the book Pattern Play by Cris Letourneau. It's packed full with several new tangle patterns, tangleations for them, and finished examples to ooh and aah over. I put a link to it over in the right hand column so you can jump over to Amazon to order it.
A blog about my zentangles, zentangle inspired art, and other artistic pursuits. In the Chicago area.
A blog about my zentangles, zentangle inspired art, and other artistic pursuits. In the Chicago area.
Zentangle plates is a concept where 4 tiles are put together. They all have the same circular strings but are tangled with their own tangle patterns. When put together they form a 'plate'. This was a fun project to do. It was interesting to choose tangle patterns that varied in light and dark, curves vs straight lines, and random vs geometric shapes. Below is each tile separately and at the end is the grouping before shading. Sampson, Bales, Coil, ? Rain, Meer, Zenith, N'zeppel Crescent moon, Echoism, Copada, W2 Bales fragment, Onamato, Ditto, Surf's up/also named ___?
A blog about my zentangles, zentangle inspired art, and other artistic pursuits. In the Chicago area.
A blog about my zentangles, zentangle inspired art, and other artistic pursuits. In the Chicago area.
Ditto is a tangle pattern I deconstructed after seeing a picture of art deco wallpaper on Pinterest. It has been posted previously but I was playing around with it the other day and had fun coming up with tangleations for it. I show it here in a row that would be perfect for a border but rows can be easily be combined for a fill pattern. Fill inside the 'fish/comma' shapes or fill around the shapes. Shade within the shapes for a different effect. And notice all the different tangleations. They can all be used as tangleations on other tangle patterns. This picture is shown vertically because I think it's easier to draw the tangle if you go up in a stairstep/zigzag manner. Remember when you are drawing zentangle patterns, ROTATE your tile or paper so that the tangle is comfortable to draw. I love these last tangleations that play with the basic shape of the 'fish'. And then you can totally go outside of the parallel lines and fill a variety of sections on your tile. It's OK to adapt the number of little 'fish' to fit your section. I made a video of how to draw Ditto that is posted on You Tube. If the link above doesn't work try clicking here. If you want more inspiration on tangleations I highly recommend the book Pattern Play by Cris Letourneau. It's packed full with several new tangle patterns, tangleations for them, and finished examples to ooh and aah over. I put a link to it over in the right hand column so you can jump over to Amazon to order it.
This is an interesting technique that I learned recently. It's done by rubbing graphite all over your paper and then erasing within the confines of a stencil. The tangles are then done with a pen as usual. I have a brass stencil that has pens, a pencil and a brush. Only three shapes fit on my tile but that is fine by me. As I picked my tangles I tried to choose ones that would add extra black areas in it. Fun, fun! It's not a traditional zentangle but I really enjoyed playing with it. This piece is much bigger than a tile. It uses the big butterfly from one brass stencil, the small butterfly from another stencil and the word from a third. If you look at this one closely you will see that I decided to use a pencil for the tangles on the little butterfly so that there would be even less emphasis on it,
Tipple is one of those tangle patterns that you can do anything with. It stands on its own or it fills any string you have. I decided to try a little 'mooka' string and filled it with tipple and then added some extra big tipple in the back - 'drawing behind'. Fun to do! I've also gotten myself started up again on my Alphabet Soup Challenge. The Alphabet Soup challenge is one I issued to myself. The goal is to try to use tangle patterns that are not official patterns, but to use only the ones that start with a certain letter of the alphabet. I realized as I looked through my collection of tangles that this was a project that could certainly be done!!! This tile 'G' features the following tangles; Golven - Mariet Girlande - Simone Bischoff Gear 1 - Molossus Genoa - Donald Wilka Gingham - Margaret Bremner Anyone is welcome to join me in this challenge. Post it wherever you like - I don't have a linky machine. If you don't have a blog or Facebook page just email me a picture and I'll post it here. And if you wonder why I have the letter G here - well, I'm a Gemini, I tend to get too many projects going at one time and get sidetracked. If you go back in my blog to October and November of 2012, you will see the beginning of the alphabet posted
The Bright Owl is back to posting again. She has posted many wonderful Zendala templates but had to take some time off for her education. She has come back with a bang now and I need to catch up! The link to get to her site is on the right column under 'links'. This is Dare #100. I love its ability to be interpreted in many ways. Here's mine.
It's November. It's getting cold so we are insulating all the cracks - We've been in this house almost 30 years, it's amazing that we are still finding new places to add insulation. So for November I am doing this special challenge. This zendala uses only three tangles that start with the letters NOV - N'zeppel - official zentangle tangle, Oslo - Elaine Benfatto, Vigne - Sue Jacobs (me). I made this mandala temolate with a new toy I discovered. It literally is a toy - but it works well with the regular Zendala tiles.It's the Mini Mandala Maker by Ravensburger. Amazon sells it for a very reasonable cost. The ad for it is in the column on the right. If you click on it and purchase through it, Amazon will pay me a small amount.
Summer is winding down so I wanted to try a zendala to remember the warm, lazy days of summer. (However, for me, this summer has been busier than ever.) I love the template, #107, Erin posted at The Bright Owl so I got started with it on one of my hand colored tiles. The tangles were done with a brown Micron and the shading with colored pencils. A few highlights were then added with my white graphite pencil.
A blog about my zentangles, zentangle inspired art, and other artistic pursuits. In the Chicago area.
The Alphabet Soup challenge is one I issued to myself. The goal is to use tangle patterns that are not official tangle patterns, but to use only ones that start with the designated letter of the alphabet. I realized as I looked through my collection of tangles that this was a project that could certainly be done. This tile gave me a chance to try out a number of tangles that I really haven't used before. Jalousie - Phine Jay - Molossus Japan diamond - Laura Liu Jax - Vera Giesbredt Jems - Margaret Bremner Joust - Elaine Benefatto Anyone is welcome to join me in this challenge. Post it wherever you like - I don't have a linky machine. If you don't have a blog or a facebook page just email me a picture and I'll post it here.
A blog about my zentangles, zentangle inspired art, and other artistic pursuits. In the Chicago area.
Playing with a new technique this week. At the last Prairie Tanglers meeting, Tess Carlson Imobersteg taught a class using paper circles punched out of a variety of papers. She then showed us a folding technique to get the blossom petals.. Add tangles, and fun! I enjoyed this new way to play with tangling. I used a colored pen for the purple lines and a brush with an iridescent white ink for the white lines. It looks white in this picture but sparkles in person. These blooms are in progress. I've used a variety of scrapbook papers, colored cardstock, and even junk mail. The purple one is in the middle and I'll be pondering what tangles I want to use on the other blossoms.
A blog about my zentangles, zentangle inspired art, and other artistic pursuits. In the Chicago area.
A blog about my zentangles, zentangle inspired art, and other artistic pursuits. In the Chicago area.
A blog about my zentangles, zentangle inspired art, and other artistic pursuits. In the Chicago area.
Click on any pattern to enlarge (or follow the links to the original posts) Adeline adeline instructions Zhostovo Border ...
A blog about my zentangles, zentangle inspired art, and other artistic pursuits. In the Chicago area.
A blog about my zentangles, zentangle inspired art, and other artistic pursuits. In the Chicago area.
There is a new tangle from Zentangle. It's called Rumpus and it's lots of fun to play with. Rick and Maria have a YouTube video demonstrating it that will get you going. In my version I used a set of 6 3z tiles. (It's done on a Zendala tile in the video.) I used 3zs so I could do this tangle in a larger scale and play with it by rearranging the 3z tiles. Photos below. I used a sepia colored pen and colored pencils for shading. I originally did it with just a brown colored pencil for shading. I wanted to play with color though so I added two shades of yellow, two shades of orange and two shades of red colored pencils. One of the fun things about doing it on 3Z tiles is that you can rearrange them to make different patterns. I had a lot of fun playing with the different results. Check my blog post earlier to see some of the options - click here.
A blog about my zentangles, zentangle inspired art, and other artistic pursuits. In the Chicago area.
Last week the Diva issued her weekly challenge and it was to 'Relax!' With the stress I'm under right now with my husband's illness I thought that this challenge was perfect for me. I'm lucky that I have a support system of friends. We get together at my house once a week (most of the time) and we work on our crafts while we talk about what is going on in our lives. We started out doing decorative painting together but now we have branched out to beading, quilting, and of course, Zentangle. Since we were together again after a few weeks off, I had the incentive to tangle again. I decided to start with a large sheet of tan paper. I wanted to have lots of room to play. I first thought I would just start drawing but as I sat down I saw a round, cork, hot pad and used it to lightly draw a small circle in pencil. A Tupperware lid provided the inner circle. One of my comfort tangles - a tangle that just flows from my pen, is the Flux shape. So I went back and forth with it along the circle strings. As I worked I consciously told myself to relax, to take my time. When I needed to stop, I stopped. When I didn't know what to do next I just set it aside and didn't worry about it. So I didn't get this piece finished till today.
A blog about my zentangles, zentangle inspired art, and other artistic pursuits. In the Chicago area.
This week Adele Bruno challenged us to use string 43 from Tanglepatterns.com along with several B tangles. I resisted looking at other entries before I did mine so that I would not be influenced by them. Adele posted all the entries on her blog today. click here . It's fascinating how some of them are similiar but yet so different. And some of the tiles are really 'out of the box'.
Color! - Oh, how it excites me! This weeks challenge is to use color as our string. One of the suggestions was to use a stencil and to spritz or daub the color over it. I ended up going more free form with my color. In the tile above I dribbled three colors of ink onto my tile and kind of played with it. I purposely left areas of white space. When it was dry I outlined everything and tangled in the white spaces. There is also a little bit of shading with colored pencil to make those areas more defined but it's hard to see that in the photograph. This is another tile I did at the same time as the first one. I've done the outlining but haven't started the tangles yet. This tile was done with a wet into wet technique. I used water to wet the whole tile first and then added color here and there. I didn't have the white spaces to tangle within so I used my colored pens and tried a different approach. This is a group of tiles I did at the same time while I was playing with my inks. As you can see, you will get quite a few unexpected results as you try to get the one that inspires you. The two tiles below are ones that I think will be next to go up on the drawing table. Stay tuned!
A blog about my zentangles, zentangle inspired art, and other artistic pursuits. In the Chicago area.
This post is sort of a 'Before and After'. It includes a Zentangle I did yesterday and a tangle I did back in 2010 - shortly after I discovered Zentangle. I used the tangle I did back in 2010 as an inspiration for the new tile. It has a similar string and similar tangles. But I found ways I could improve on it and use some of the skills I learned since then. Since it is my own work, I don't have to be polite. I can - and will critique the heck out of it. The tangle from 2010 was done on the back of a flimsy index card. I know now to use quality, archival materials. I now use quality paper and pens that will not fade over time. Thankfully, this piece was in a binder, so it wasn't exposed to sunlight. I had learned a few of the tangles back then as I surfed the web. Some of them you will recognize, and some - I have no idea where they came from! I like that there are so many tangles that have step-outs online so I can really expand my selections. I tried to use the same tangles I used in 2010 but some I had to revise. I was able to create a string within a circle. I used a circle template to draw the circle with my pen. I don't do that anymore. It looks almost machine made and doesn't have the handmade look that I value. Now I draw a circle in pencil first and then use my pen freehand. The string is OK but has so many tiny sections that created problems for me. As I drew my piece in 2010, I tried so hard to get tangles into all the tiny places within the string that I ended up drawing the tangles tight and small. If you look at the new piece on top, you can see that I took the tangle patterns and drew them bigger. When I had the freedom to draw bigger, some of the 'tightness' disappeared. The 2010 piece doesn't have any shading. I didn't understand that back then but now it's my favorite part of the process. My new piece also uses highlights since it's done on a Renaissance tile. That's something that didn't even exist back in 2010. I really like how it expands the piece and gives it depth. I invite any of you who have been tangling for a while (even if only for a couple of months) to revisit one of your early tiles and redo it!
This month I celebrated my 5th anniversary of becoming a CZT (Certified Zentangle Instructor). Zentangle has given me so much since I learned the method. I genuinely enjoy sharing it in my classes. As I was chatting with other CZTs that were in my same class, we all felt the same and wanted to celebrate. Sine it is our 5th anniversary and we were class #5, we decided to do a swap among ourselves. We decided to each create 5 tiles and somewhere on the tile to include the number 5. I decided to use the number 5 as my string. I used my orange colored tiles and a brown Micron pen. Shading was done with a colored pencil and highlights were added with a chalk pencil. Here are the tiles before I added the background tangles - you can see the '5' string a little more easily. I challenged myself to find different tangles for each tile. It took a little longer than I thought. Here are the last two of the group of five - with and without their background tangles. And a group photo.
Rainbow Beads - The diva challenge this week is inspired by the Beads of Courage program that she supports. It is a wonderful way to support and encourage children who are receiving all sorts of medical treatments. See Laura's blog at iamthedivaczt.blogspot.com for more details. I decided to use a variety of linear tangles that reminded me of beads. And to remember the victims of the terrible tragedy in Orlando I decided to use a rainbow background. Creating the rainbow background was a creative journey so I am sharing photos that show how I picked the colors to use. All the tangling was done with a black pen. I used colored pencils that coordinated with the color of the stripe behind it for the shading. A little white pencil added some highlights. Tangles used: Zenith, Lezy, Eek, Binial, Girland, and Inapod. These are the Tombow dual brush markers. I used the method where you put each color on a plastic palette first. I then wet my tile thoroughly with water. Using a wet brush, I picked up the colors one at a time and stroked them on, allowing them to softly blend into each other. This envelope is where I tried out the Tombow colors that I wanted - I looked at the pictures of the rainbow flag online so I had an idea of the shades I was going for. I had to try out a few different markers to get the right choice. I also tried out my Inktense pencils. The tile is where I tried out the possible color choices. With the Inktense it's important to wet them to see the colors. When I did the tile I colored the paper directly with the pencils and then wet each stripe. I haven't tangled on this tile yet but I will!
CanT - The tangle from Chris Titus CZT is a fun tangle that starts with the Florz tangle and goes on and on. As I was playing with it I was more and more fascinated with the diamond shape I was seeing so I decided to play with it in this tile. I used a Renaissance tile to start. Pencil shading - white graphite - and a little colored pencil shading. The pictures of the tile in progress are below. I apologize that the color is off in the photos. - I took them indoors and only went outside for the final photo. starting the tangle with linework only adding just pencil shading adding the white graphite This was an experiment with a small scratch off tile. As I scratched, the colors below were revealed. I couldn't find a tool that scratched well without scratching all the way down to the white so I kept trying different tools. In the end I decided to just use the white scratches that went too deep and try to make them work as highlights. It was an interesting process but I wasn't happy - plus my hand hurt from trying different tools - so I think I'm done with these.
A blog about my zentangles, zentangle inspired art, and other artistic pursuits. In the Chicago area.
A blog about my zentangles, zentangle inspired art, and other artistic pursuits. In the Chicago area.
The challenge from the Diva this week is to use a tangle pattern called '8s Parte Dos'. It's a tangle that really requires extra concentration. And true to my usual form, I made it extra tricky for myself by doing it as a monotangle zendala. I made a few mistakes - especially around the edges - but in Zentangle, there are no mistakes so I'm accepting it as it is and enjoying it. I started using the sphere template from Margaret Bremner but I modified it a bit. I used one of my colored tiles and a black Micron pen. Then I shaded with a purple colored pencil and added a few highlights with a yellow pencil.
My grandson was christened recently and I wanted to do something special for him.Gifts for boys always seem to be harder than gifts for girls. And since this was for his christening, it narrowed the possibilities even more. I ended up being inspired by the work of Joanne Fink. She has a couple of books out under the Zenspirations titles. I combined inspiration from her with inspiration from design work from Margaret Bremner CZT to create this. Our special grandson. May God bless him! He is wearing a christening gown that my grandmother bought for me as an infant. Since then the gown has been worn by many different family members. I ended up framing the pieces vertically instead of horizontally - it will work better in his room. I also wanted to take this opportunity to tell you about a kickstarter campaign from Joanne Fink, the artist that inspired this project. There are only a few days left in this campaign so don't delay!
Wishing you the best for the holiday season! These tiles started from an inspiration I got from Ellen Wolters. She provided the template for the Love tile. After I did that I wanted to go on with other sentiments for the holidays. I looked through the books I have by Joanne Fink - 'Zenspirations' and 'Dangle Designs'. That's where I found ideas for the lettering. Each of these tiles started out with a tile I had previously hand colored with water color paints. I did the line work with whichever Micron pen coordinated best with the background color. The colored pencils I used for shading were chosen based on the background color also.
