Zendala Swap

One of my favorite things about teaching Zentangle is when we create a mosaic of everyone's tiles. Seeing how everyone did the same tangle patterns but did them in their own way, with their own style, brings home the message that we are all unique in this world. We may walk similar paths, but we have the power to make it our own. Since we just celebrated Earth Day, I choose to look for the ways we can find our points of agreement among our differences to save our earth.

I recently attended a seminar with over 100 Zentangle Teachers in Florida. Many of us created Zendalas using 4 tiles. We then traded with others to create new unique Zendalas. I did two sets and the two pictures that start this post are the two sets that I did.

All of the tiles were displayed on tables so we could see all of them at once and ooh and ahh. I took LOTS of pictures. These are just a few.

As you can see, you don't even have to arrange them in a circle to make an effective display.

These two sets are the ones I went home with.

Thank you to all who participated!!!!

Circle Square

I went crazy with ideas for the circle/square string challenge this week. There are many ways I could have varied the sizes of the shapes but I decided to use only a 2"square and 2" circle. I did 3 tiles with  technique variations. All the backgrounds are done with watercolor paint. I used colored pens for the tangles and colored pencils for the shading on all the tiles. I couldn't decide which one I liked best. Which one is your favorite?\

On the first tile, the background was colored a light violet first. I did the entire square with pink and let it dry. Then I did the entire circle with blue. The tangles are Zenith, Paradox, Cadent and Diva Dance.

On the tile above I started with a tile colored pink. I then cut out the square shape from paper colored purple and the circle used a blue paper. I glued them onto the pink paper and tangled away. Tangles are Bales and Hurry Holli.

I started here with a tile with a lightly mottled pink color. Then I put a circle shape and a square shape on top. With a spray bottle I spayed additional pink paint. I carefully removed the circle and square. When it was fully dry I added the tangles and shading. Tangles are Ditto, Raddox and Tripoli.

These are the tiles before the tangles were added. I photographed this late at night so the color isn't very good. I started adding tangles to the one tile before I remembered to take the picture but hey, that happens!

Frunky

Frunky is a new tangle pattern that I started playing with last night. Laura Harms started doing a video chat where she demonstrated it and I tangled along with her. Frunky is a tangle developed by  Katharina Königsbauer-Kolb. It seems to be a combination of Fescue and Shattuck. The step outs can be found by clicking here.  After I followed Laura I found the original step outs online and found that I ended up doing the tangle in a similar way to the way Katharina did hers.

As I was halfway through I realized I wanted to take a picture without all the shading so you can see what shading adds. Well, since I was already half done I figured I would just photograph the tile at that stage. I added a little more shading to refine details that you can see above.