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.