Tangles with tangle stings

Some tangle patterns lend themselves perfectly to use as strings. All you need to do is to "biggify" them. Blow them up in size. Then add the tangles of your choice.
The first one I tried is meer. I used a variety of tangles within the lines. The fun thing I discovered as I worked though, is that sometimes I could use the line as part of the smaller tangles too. See the rain tangle and vertigoh tangle.

Then I did a large W2 and filled it with zenith. Zenith is one of the newer tangles and has become one of my favorites.

Finally I tried using drupe as a string. I didn't quite get the tangle done as shown in the stepouts. But since there are no mistakes I went with it anyway. I decided to keep the smaller tangle simple and add only some echoism. Shading finished it for me.

Below are pictures of the tiles in progress so you can see the stages.

Basic tangling on vacation

The Diva challenge is to go back to basics this week. Just use black pen with pencil shading on a 3 1/2 inch paper tile.

As I'm visiting family this week it's a perfect challenge.  I created a string using my granddaughters' initials - A and O. Then I just started tangling with whatever felt right. Pokeleaf, Mooka, and Bales.

2016 String

Happy New Year! I wanted to do a tile that celebrated the new year but I wanted to stay true to the spirit of Zentangle and not be too representational. I mean - I didn't want it to look like 'something'. So how could I be inspired? Out came a stack of looseleaf papers and I traced a couple of tiles and started sketching and playing. I eventually came up with using the year to create my string.

But how to use the numbers? At first I lined them up normally but that wasn't very useful for tangling. Then I tried overlapping the numbers and I could start to see some possibilities. Then I realized that I didn't even need the entire number - just a part of the number would do. I drew the numbers so they extended past the outline of the tile. When I was happy with my results the string that resulted was highlighted with a red marker.

This is the tile before I added the shading. I was afraid it was looking too busy but once the shading was done it all came together.