Borders on furniture

The patterns that we find all around us and also use in Zentangle, can be used in many ways. A friend of mine asked me to customize her daughter's furniture as she had grown out of her pink room. She had purchased the bedding that can be seen in the background of the picture. So she gave me the chair with instructions to paint it blue and add elements from the bedding into the chair. The repetitive pattern of the fern that I saw in the pillows worked well as a border on the chair. I did this with white paint and a paintbrush. I also did the desktop but the light on the desktop makes it difficult to see here. 

Minouche and String 008

Today's tile features a tangle pattern from Nathalie Marinoff CZT. It's called Minouche. The step outs can be found on Tanglepatterns.com. It's a tangle that lends itself to many variations. If you look closely you can see that this entire tile was done with the Minouche tangle. I simply added a different tangleation each time I changed colors. This tile also uses String 008.

The color on this tile was done with Tombow markers. I colored the whole thing with the yellow (seen in the middle) and then added the orange and red shading colors to the other sections using a watercolor technique.

duotangle - Tipple and Knightsbridge

The Diva challenge this week is to use basic tangle patterns, tipple and knightsbridge, together. Sounds like a simple enough challenge. I find I don't use knightsbridge too much because for me it is almost too basic. So I wasn't coming up with any interesting design ideas.

I decided to go with color. These two tangles are so different they are almost opposites. So I went with colors that are the opposite sides of the color wheel. Yikes. It hurts my eyes just to look at this picture so you can imagine it wasn't fun to use this combo in my tile. Lesson learned, I won't do that again.

This red is so bright that in combination with the green orbs, I'm thinking 'frog in a blender'. Tee hee, please don't call the society for prevention of cruelty to animals on me!

new crescent moon tangleation

Whenever I teach I always enjoy looking at the tiles that the students create. There is such variation in the way they do the tangles and a variety of ways they shade them. Sometimes I find that a student has created a tangleation that I have never seen before and I add it to my file of ideas. This tangleation of crescent moon developed in a presentation I did at the Palatine Public Library last Saturday. I was there for 4 hours so I regret that I didn't get a picture of the actual tile that was created with this tangleation.

The two tiles below were from last night at McHenry County College. I had a real nice mix of ages and there were 4 males! Great work ladies and gents! I'll be back there next week for a Beyond the Basics class.

Do you see how one student decided to tangle on the back and incorporate the red zentangle logo into his tile!

String thing - String 07

Today's tile uses one of the string ideas from Tangle Patterns.com. It's string 07. Adele Bruno at her blog http://tickledtotangle.blogspot.com/ has challenged us to use this string AND to use ONLY tangles that have names that start with the letters 'Ba'. I thought this might limit me but when I looked through my tangles I was very happy with the wide selection I found.

color, Color, COLOR!

Color, COLOR! I love using color in my zentangle inspired artwork. So much so that when the diva asked us to use color in her challenge this week I couldn't decide because there are so many ways I love to use color. Ultimately I decided to combine the latest zendala dare here too. This is Erin's, from The Bright Owl, dare #73. This zendala template just cried out for color to me. I used my Tombow markers like watercolor paint to achieve the soft gradations and then added tangles with a pink Sakura Micron pen. I also decided to let my tangles be simple so the color could shine through.

As I was working on this I also played with my full sheets that I hand color and then cut down to size. This is a sneak peek of the one I just did. I'm not sure yet if I will cut it into 3 1/2" tiles, zendala tiles, or larger pieces for ZIAs. Keep checking this blog for updates!

This sheet measures 22" x 30". I placed my zendala tile pictured above on the sheet so you can see the relative size.

Alphabet Soup - I

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 'I' features the following tangles;

Iffy - Lizzy Mayne

Ionic border - Margaret Bremner

In a pod - Carole Ohl

Istanbul - 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 Facebook page just email me a picture and I'll post it here.

'well'

The new tangle pattern 'well' came out last week in the zentangle newsletter. It's a simple enough looking pattern but it takes a little increased focus to get it right. All in all, that's MY kind of tangle! 

I played around with it for a little while on a piece of paper by my bedside and as I was doing it, I came up with this tangleation. I like to do my first explorations of a new tangle pattern as a monotangle. It features just it's properties. My tangleation added extra lines inside. I basically just followed the lines of the fan shape. I left a few of the fan shapes blank intentionally so you could really see how I was inspired.

The tangles were done with a pink 05 Sakura Micron Pigma pen and the shading with a colored pencil.

Tangled boxes

I was getting ready to ship this box out when I looked at the plain white sides. They were crying out to be tangled. This didn't take very long. I hope the recipients of this box enjoy the tangles too!

Since this was a quick project I used a sharpie marker for the tangles and a grey marker for the shading.

Barrington Area Library

I've been doing presentations in local libraries for a while now and yesterday I finally did one for my own, home library. My library is undergoing extensive renovations so I understand what the delay was. Our library has a program where artists are invited to set up in the lobby and do mini programs on a drop-in basis. Well, once I had a few people sit town to try it, they were hooked! They wanted me to keep going! As you can see, they did really beautiful work. When we created our mosaic of our tiles they were all amazed at how each could do so many different things with the same tangles!

Beamz

I'm trying out the tangle 'Beamz' for the diva challenge this week. I wasn't sure how I wanted to approach this at first and then, in the middle of the night, I came up with the idea of putting one inside of another, inside of another, inside of another, etc. I tried it out using a Identipen on the biggest tangle first, then the finer tip, then moving to a 08 Micron pen, then moving to a 02 pen. At first I thought, 'Meh', it was just so-so, but then I shaded it, and I was much happier. 

I thought I would try another one too. I started in the middle of a black circle tile with a white gelly roll pen and worked my way out. I tried to do it regularly but it ended up a little more random. I was thinking about the name 'beamz' and how it sortof reminded me of flashlight beams, so I added a few 'flares' with my soapstone. It's not what I had in my mind when I started, but it's interesting. And in Zentangle we embrace the unintended results! I'll try this tangle out on some other tiles in the future!

Alphabet Soup H

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 'H' features the following tangles;

Hypnotic - Ellen Wolters

Heartvine - Lori Howe

Hole in the Wall - Texas Doxie Mama

Helecopters - Dianne

Hi-C Anita Roby-Lavery

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.

Michigan jammie retreat report

Over the last few days I've been showing you works in progress from the retreat I just attended. I'm home now and rested up. I love going to seminars but when I get home I need some time to just rest and do nothing. (of course, it did take me 5 hours of driving each way so that tired me out too)

Above is the completed portfolio. We literally made it from scratch, starting with mat-board, paper, and glue. Jean Theurkauf, our fearless leader, made it a much easier process that I thought it would be. She brought so many beautiful colors of Lotka paper with her too, so everyone's portfolio was different. 

I started tangling on my portfolio during class. I know I'll add more but I haven't decided what yet.

These are just a few of the other portfolios completed by the rest of the group.

At the end we collected all our projects on the dining table and oohed and aahed over everyone's work. And of course, we all took pictures.

These are my projects.