Mooka

In homage to Alphonse Maria Mucha, art nouveau artiste extraordinaire, Maria Thomas demonstrates a new tangle "Mooka". And knowing that we'd all be wanting to try it anyway, the Diva's challenge this week is to use Mooka in either a Zentangle tile or a piece of zentangle-inspired art.

Here's my first go at it. I just wanted to get a feel for the tangle, try it in various configurations, get to understand it a little. It certainly has the desired tendrilly, botanical, art nouveau look. I found I like it better than I thought I would. That's good for me as I tend toward straighter lines with a set look for the resulting pattern. But I've always loved Art Nouveau!

With a new tangle I often begin with a border. I need to contain it somehow. That's what I did above. Mooka is organic, fiddleheady, flowy, and adaptable. I felt I needed a bit more space and that's probably that's why on my second tile I abandoned the border and went to the edges. I also wanted to try some different ends on the ...

DIGRESSION: What should we call those? I was going to say "fronds" thinking of palm fronds or fern fronds, but a frond is the whole leafy branch, not just the single leaf part. (At this point 'frond' just looks and sounds really silly, but I'll try to stay focused.) In the middle of writing this post I went to the internet and discovered that "The leafy branch of the fern is usually called a frond. The small leaflets that make up the whole frond are called pinnae." Pinnae. There is a tangle called Pina and that might get confusing. A leaflet could be an advertisement or a flyer. Howz 'bout we call them frondlets?

... frondlets.

Tangles: MOOKA, Flux, Lotus Pods, Pearlz, Striping, Tipple

I discovered that by putting a line through the pointy bases I could fill the background/negative space, avoid running that pattern/black into the adjacent frondlet, and ended up with an interesting Striping effect. I tried using a white pen on some of the black areas, but I wasn't happy with it and blacked over some of it! (I think it needs larger black areas to work well.)

I tried a third tile, still wanting to do something different on the ends of the frondlets. There's something about those bulby ends I don't like.

Tangles: MOOKA, Fern (by Jane Monk), Floatfest (by Carole Ohl), Perfs, PokeLeaf and as yet unnamed.

I love the botanical look of this tangle, but I think I need to loosen up a bit with it. It's definitely going to find its way into an art commission I'm working on which requires some 'shrubery'. I'm doing ten tangled houses for a couple's tenth wedding anniversary. More on that in a month or two.

Now off to make a mocha and make more Mooka. Mmmm.