Ellish

Ellish is the newest official tangle pattern. The step outs can be found in the latest newsletter from Zentangle.com. It is a very elegant tangle.

I'm still learning and practicing it. I've seen a few examples where people have done the tangle multiple times. I'll get to that later. Right now I wanted to let the tangle shine on its own. I wanted to add lots of highlights and shading. Then I added the tangle Zenith as a frame.

Pens and Butterflies

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, 

Pokeroot and drupe

Trying to get my challenge done this week I pulled out a tile I started the night before.  This was the perfect tile to work on during a meeting. Pokeroot and drupe are two tangles that play very nicely with each other.

I knew I wanted to work on a green tile so I picked out several of my hand colored tiles. I had the green pen but I used one of my favorite tricks to see which tile it looked best on. Junk mail has little plastic windows that have just enough tooth to hold the ink of the pen. So I scribble a bit and see which combination makes me happier.

I shaded with a green colored pencil and highlights were added with a white chalk pencil.

Tangled feather

During my recent trip I learned several new techniques for tangling. One of my favorites was this one called "Zero Drawing" taught by Meredith Yuhas. Simply, it involves creating your own toned paper with graphite and then erasing the design area using a stencil and a fine tipped Zero eraser. More information on this technique is available in the book Pencil Magic by Marie Browning.

This technique was lots of fun to use to add tangles to. I had fun choosing the tangles and then decided to leave several sections without tangles to leave a place for the eye to rest. A liile extra weight to the edges with heavier pen lines and I was very happy. 

Teacher get together in Portland

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One of the benefits of becoming a Certified Zentangle Teacher is that you gain a community of other teachers who are equally excited by Zentangle are are interested in continuing our learning and exploring where Zentangle can take us. We have message boards, Facebook groups, and periodic get  togethers, both on a local and national scale. 

Last weekend was one of those events. It was held in Portland, Maine. We had over 100 CZTs gathered in a lovely hotel, enjoying great food, great classes, forming and renewing friendships, and exploring the picturesque city of Portland. 

The pictures here are from just one of the classes. It was taught by Kate Lamontagne. We explored ways to create Zendalas using a special rotating compass tool. You can see it pictured in the corner of the picture below which is my work in progress. You can also see the top of my pen so you can see the scale of the piece.

After we all had our Zendalas drawn in ink we then were guided in adding colored pencil work to our pieces. Mine isn't quite done, I have a few more things to add. But I wanted to show you how it's coming.

The other picture below is from a class taught my Molly Hollibaugh. Molly took us back to the basics of Zentangle. It is soooo good to remember what got me hooked in the first place. We did the traditional class mosaic of all out pieces. It was quite a sight to behold!!!