Zendala tool - Free

This Zendala was made with a free (well, almost free) template tool. A while back I told you about a Zendala maker that you can purchase on Amazon (link in the side panel). But this Zendala can be made with something you would normally throw away.

I purchased a package of the Healthy Choice Cafe Steamers in the frozen food section of my grocery store. There are several different options to choose from. Go ahead and cook your food as directed on the package. When you are done, wash out the steamer basket from the package.

Here is what the steamer basket looks like. It's a hard plastic. It's probably not great for the environment but it makes a nice little tool here. Because you see the circular perforations in the middle? Well they fit perfectly over a regular size Zentangle tile. Just lay your tile underneath it and use it like a stencil to pick out the holes you want.

The perforations are almost a rice shape but I'll call them dots here.

Here is what I did for this tile. I stenciled all the holes from the inner circle and skipped the middle circle. On the outer circle I stenciled one dot, then skipped two dots, and so on.  I did this first in pencil but later as I worked on the Zendala I ended up doing them in ink. The nice thing about doing them in pencil though, is that it leaves you options as you work.

I then connected the dots. 1) I connected the dots to each other. 2) I added a curved line to connect the tops of the dots. 3) I drew a curved line that angled from a dot on the inner circle to a dot on the outer circle.

Every time you do this you can choose different perforations and/or you can connect them in different ways. So you can make a variety of  Zendalas with this tool.

From here on out I tangled away as I normally do. The tile above uses Striping, Purk, Meer, Flux, N'Zeppel and Paradox. An aura around the hole thing and pencil shading completed it.