Thursday, April 28, 2011

The great value of working small

I subscribe to Robert Genn's Twice-Weekly Letter to artists. In a recent one, titled "Little Bets" there were a few sentences that immediately made me think of Zentangle, its small scale and its encouraging attitude toward "non-artists".

What particularly struck me was this:  "...when students are encouraged to do volumes of small items they become accepting-- even proud--of their failures and are more readily able to move on to ideas that work better for them. Simply put, and perhaps surprisingly, less commitment widens opportunity... even beginners are seen to produce gems. As the lady said, "It's better to have a small diamond than a large piece of glass."

I have felt this very frequently myself while creating a zentangle. I love the small size of the Zentangle tile. I love that it doesn't take me weeks to finish something. I love being able to mess up, create a dud, appreciate the lessons, and put it aside (or even trash it).

It's better to have a small diamond than a large piece of glass. There's another terrific metaphor that applies to Zentangle! I often tell my students that they are creating mini-masterpieces.

If you're interested, you can read Robert Genn's entire post here.

And just because I always prefer books with pictures, here's a recent tile:

Tangles: Caviar, Crescent Moon, Gneiss, Tipple, Ixorus (sort of).
I also used some gray ink and white ink over black. And pencil shading of course.

CAVIAR ANYONE?
Notice a couple of sections in the upper left filled with tiny circles. I like using that as a filler, but I don't know of a name for it. A while ago I read something where it was referred to as "caviar" which I think is a brilliant name. Unless someone knows of a name for it, I suggest we call it Caviar.

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

DUTCH HOURGLASS tangle instructions

It's been almost a year since I was in Whitinsville for the Zentangle teacher training seminar. One of the other participants was Maria Vennekens from the Netherlands. One day she wore a shirt with a lot of patterns, and I noticed something like this among them. To me, the initial 'X' with the filled-in top and bottom looks like an hourglass.  Thus "Dutch Hourglass".  If the pattern is big enough I like to put tiny black dots in each of the white dots, but - of course - it's your choice. Here's how to do Dutch Hourglass:



Here are some tiles using Dutch Hourglass.

In the first, the tangle is used as a field in two sections of the string. If you do this tangle, be sure to make the stripes/diamonds/triangles a good size. You need room for the three circles.

At the top left of this tile you'll see a "tangle" that I'm calling Botched Dutch Hourglass Resurrected.  :-)  I didn't make it large enough and had no room for the white circles, so I filled the triangles with black, which was too bold so I added large black dots in the middle of the diamonds which toned it down but was still rather bold so I gave it lots of shading.

Tangles: Dutch Hourglass, Facets, Parabola, Rick's Paradox, Striping (and, in the interests of thoroughness, Botched Dutch Hourglass Resurrected)

In the next tile, I used a single row of Dutch Hourglass in one of the 'ribbons' of the string. All these tiles began with wide two-pencil strings. To do a wide two-pencil string I place an eraser between the two pencils. (Ha! There IS a use for erasers in Zentangle!)

Tangles: Dutch Hourglass, Crescent Moon (with a highlight), Inapod, Yincut and a Knightsbridge Aura

Here again I've used it in a ribbon. I think it's those 2-pencil strings I started with. Another interesting thing in this tile is two slightly different effects with the tangle Tidings. In the top right it's done with only lines. In the lower right I've filled the tiny extra spaces with black.

Tangles: Dutch Hourglass, Beadline, Munchin, black Pearlz, Tidings

Overnight on April 26, I'll be winging my way to Halifax to visit my recently-married daughter and her husband for ten days. After that it's Bermuda for a week to visit my husband's sister and her husband. You bet I'm taking lots of Zentangle supplies with me! I'll need to do some creating myself, and who knows, maybe I'll get a chance to share it with others. Interspersed with visiting, whale-watching, board games, Peggy's Cove, snorkelling, restaurants, and touring of course!

Friday, April 22, 2011

RAG ATCs received


A few months ago I sent nine zentangle-inspired artist trading cards (ATCs) to the Richmond Art Gallery in British Columbia for their 5th (and last, I learned later) annual artist trading card show. There were over 420 participants from all over the world. At the end of the exhibition, the cards are traded and gallery staff does a tremendous amount of work effecting trades for all the out-of-town artists.  Here is a photo of one wall of the exhibition, from the RAG's Facebook page:


You can see the cards I sent here. Below is a photo of part of the gallery. My cards are in the upper left. Lucky to have made it into one of the photos clearly enough to know they're mine!


Here are the cards I received in return. The three in the right column are fabric: machine embroidery on linen, weaving, and felt work. The one at the middle left is a collection of 'found' objects. The lower middle one has cut-out windows.


I also received the 'catalogue' for the show: a poster with a list of all the artists, where they live and their placement in the gallery, and on the other side one image from each of the participants. Here it is, 400 artist trading cards!


And... will ya lookit that?!? Way in the lower left corner? Someone else contributed Zentangle inspired cards, too!!!


Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Variations on Themes

Last night I taught a new class, Variations on Themes. This is my "level 3" class. We had fun and ran over the scheduled time by 20 minutes. No one minded. We were quite Zen about it. :-)

The first tile (top row) was variations on grid patterns: Bales, Cubine with a corner, Nancy Pinke's Facets, my tangle Gingham, Screen, and Suzanne McNeill's Up and Across. We began with a very curvy string, then covered the entire tile with a grid, then drew the tangles.
Screen is one of my tangle patterns, inspired by an oriental screen. See instructions here.

The second tile has a tangle border: Cadent with double lines, and Cadent with a Yincut fill. The three sections inside that are Zedbra (by yours truly and the Diva Laura Harms) and Chartz (both variations on a zigzag), and Puf (Carole Ohl's variation on Bales). We filled the two sides of Chartz with Tipple and Msst. Another time I might choose a stronger tangle (Knightsbridge? Striping?) to counter-balance Zedbra which is very bold.




Monday, April 18, 2011

ZIA book cover art

Years ago we lived in three satellite communities around Ottawa, Ontario. My husband and some friends founded the Ottawa Creative Writers' Group, which has published several poetry chapbooks. I was invited to provide cover art for their upcoming publication "Markings". I submitted several pieces and they chose this one, which I call "Niner". There's a bit of collage here too, from zentangle drawings that I didn't like entirely, but that had good parts worth saving!

The book launch and a public reading will be on Saturday April 23, 7:30 pm, at 211 McArthur Avenue in Ottawa. If you're in the vicinity, why not drop by?

Saturday, April 16, 2011

All-day Zentangle workshop

I just spent a delightful day teaching Zentangle to a small group. One lady drove two hours from Regina to attend. Another was visiting from Calgary and happened upon this workshop while looking for art classes in Saskatoon. Here are a few photos.

Everyone's tiles from the morning (Introduction) session, some not quite finished.
We did two tiles and eleven tangles.






A classic Zentangle class photo!
One of the finished zentangle-inspired mandalas from the final session.

Friday, April 15, 2011

More Mooka-licious-ness-essity

Mooka's got me hooked. But then, so did Ixorus when it was presented a few months ago. In fact any tangle new to me hooks me for a while until I feel I know it well enough to add it to my tangle arsenal. I think I see a lot of possibilities in it and I just don't seem to be able to put them on paper. I had to do more.

The art nouveau botanical look of Mooka kept reminding me of a painting I like. J.E.H. MacDonald was a member  of the Group of Seven, a seminal group of Canadian landscape painters. He painted Tangled Garden in 1916. In the Diva's slide show for challenge #16 Mooka, I saw many creations that resembled tangled gardens.


I've been experimenting. I've wanted to put different ends on the 'frondlets'. I even started a page in one of my Zentangle notebooks for "Possible Frondlet Ends". (We artists are an odd lot, and I include you, dear reader, in the lot!)

I wondered if I could get a more tangled look and tried three stems, putting one up the middle as well as one on each side. I've tried making curvier stems rather than straighter - a lovely effect but I get rather confused as stems profuse. I don't think that's a verb but it rhymes with confuse! Here are starting examples of Mooka with three stems and with curvy stems. I just realized that the 3-stem example only has a middle stem on the first go-round; I'll have to work on that.


In the tile below I used the 'brush' pen for some of the lines. That's what makes them heavy and bold and a little less fluid. Note the "venus fly trap" and "grasping claws" frondlet ends, both unplanned. :-)  Despite those, I rather like this tile.

Tangles: MOOKA and Aura, Fern, Hibred, Pearlz

It seemed every time I did this, all the Mookas began in the middle of the tile and moved out. I decided I'd should probably try to include some major tangles besides Mooka. Here's one:

Tangles: MOOKA and Echoism, Finery, Striping, Poke Leaf frondlets and dots
Mooka and me - we're not done yet!

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

15 (minutes) x 4

Back to basics! When Maria Thomas and Rick Roberts designed Zentangle one of the criteria was that a tile could be completed in 15-20 minutes. No piles of unfinished projects gathering dust in the corner. Instead, a stack of lovely miniature masterpieces. The Diva's challenge this week - "15 Minutes of Fame" - is to do just that: complete a tile in 15 minutes.

Andy Warhol had an art exhibition in Sweden in 1968. In the exhibit catalog he is quoted as saying, "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." Thus was born one of the iconic statements of our times.

I know I spend longer than 15 minutes on a tile. I've started telling my students 15-30 minutes. This challenge would be interesting!

Once I got rolling it was rather invigorating. I felt like a writer at one of those weekend novel-writing contests, just blasting away, getting something down on the paper, not thinking too much about what was going on the paper.

I intended to do a couple of tiles. In the end, I did four over an hour or so. I noticed that I followed my intuition more and just went with whatever occurred to me as I was drawing. In between tiles, I found myself shaking out my hands and arms like a sprinter before a race!

Here are my four tiles, in order of creation. What amazes me is how different they all are!

There were two whole sections on the left that I didn't even get to. I shaded it instead. And the center of the coil didn't quite get finished. If I hadn't said that you probably wouldn't even have noticed. :-)

I began with a Brush pen in hopes of covering slightly more ground, more quickly!

The dots just happened. I was thinking of something else. The fact that a few sections were better left blank certainly helped with the time constraints!

I do like this one! It reminds me of a Barbara Hepworth sculpture and looks just as interesting upside down. (I have an image of everyone getting up and twisting their necks to see it!) I used a 08 pen for the heavy black areas.

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Of zebras, pandas and penguins

Photo by Robbert van der Steeg; licensed on Creative Commons

Black and white is a striking combination: the darkest dark and the lightest light. Primitive languages with only two color words have words for black and white, or more specifically dark and light.

"Mission Impossible" was a popular TV series which ran from 1966 until 1973. The series was shot in color, yet always one of the opening scenes took place in the team leader's apartment which had a color scheme of black, white and gray.  Producer Bruce Geller felt that the most striking thing in color would be... black and white.

Zentangle uses black ink on white paper, then adds gray shading. One reason is to keep it simple. Bring in color, and there's a lot more you need to know, many more decisions to make, and that can be intimidating.

Photo: Margaret Bremner; Chengdu Panda Breeding Center; Sichuan, China; February 2008
BLACK is a color of mystery, the obscure, the unknown. It is the night sky, the depths of a cave, the heart of a forest.


In ancient times, black represented the earth and the underworld, corresponding to the belly of the earth where the regeneration of the world happens. It was a symbol of fecundity and the color of fertility goddesses. Black is the color of pre-beginning in creation stories, representing the void, the non-existent.

In many North American aboriginal cultures black is the color of the West and represents adulthood and maturity.  The “black road” runs west/east and is the path of earthly difficulties and lessons. The '"red road" runs north/south and is the path of spiritual awakening. The place where they intersect, where our two modes of existence converge, is considered to be holy.

Of the five Hindu elements a black or indigo oval or egg-shape represents ‘ether’. In the west it represents death and mourning. The “Black Standard” is the prophetic symbol of the coming of the Mahdi, the redeemer of Islam.


Photo: Karl Normington (HighlandBlade); licensed on Creative Commons

WHITE is a color of innocence, purity, and radiance. It is the sun, the moon, and the stars.

White may symbolize chastity, illumination, and transcendence.  It is the color of mourning in the Far East and of brides in the west.  In many North American aboriginal cultures white is the color of the North and represents old age and wisdom. In Christian tradition, children (innocents) are buried wrapped or dressed in white, in a coffin that is white or decorated with white flowers. In India, the element ‘water’ is represented by a white or silver crescent moon.

A piece of white fabric on a pole could be seen from a great distance and could not be mistaken for any kind of flag. Thus the white flag became a symbol for surrender.

White pigment is the lack of any additional color, while white light contains all colors.  In relation to the physical body, white light is considered to be beneficial for everything as the innate intelligence of the body will absorb whatever light energy it needs.

And now for a black and white musical interlude. :-)


(Oh hurray! I think it worked! I embedded a video! Yay me!)

Saturday, April 9, 2011

BEVIA tangle instructions

One of the many things that Rick and Maria mentioned during the CZT seminar I attended in May 2010 is that no tangle is any more complicated than any other tangle, but there are certainly tangles that require more concentration. Anything is possible, one stroke at a time, right? I think this is one of those tangles that requires more concentration. It also looks nice if there's a large area of it.



On the tile below you can see Bevia in the upper left.

Tangles: BEVIA, Florez, Pearlz, Umble, W2, Yincut
and Oakling (a tangle I haven't shared yet.)

Thursday, April 7, 2011

ZIA Bookmarks

I frequently end up with bits of paper cut from the edges of larger pieces. Sometimes I cut them down to zentangle tile size or ATC size, or if they're very skinny I make bookmarks.

When I was trying Mooka the other day, I kept filling the negative spaces, but wanted to fill the Mooka frondlets with tangles. I needed to refresh my memory with tangles that go on lines or fill long, thin bands of space. Mooka also got me wanting to do curvy, organic, botanical, flowing things. I thought about Justine Ashbee's gorgeous linear art and the patterns Joanna Coke sometimes puts over her paintings and some of Jane Monk's floral designs (note the border here, top right and bottom right corner). Maybe I need a first name that begins with 'J'!

I pulled out a few bookmarks to experiment on. Three of them had two-pencil strings. Mooka found its way into three of them! Here are the results.


I think it's cool how this photo looks almost like a zentangle inspired art 'ensemble' even though each strip was pencil-strung individually.

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

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.

Friday, April 1, 2011

VennTangle challenge

Well, this was FUN! I approached it all scientific and stuff and then it just turned into fun! It IS Zentangle after all.

'Ptrish40' (AKA Patty of the "Zentangle Inspired Art" Yahoo group) posted a challenge involving Venn diagrams and intersecting/combining tangles. She dubbed it "VennTangles". Sounds scientificky, no?

Once I'd grasped the concept of the pencil string (last spring at the CZT seminar), I've loved the way tangle patterns morph into other patterns. This can be particularly cool when the tangles share structural elements. Oops, getting sciency there. Anyway, I decided to see what morphing might take place with this Venn idea for combining patterns.

I did the first one on a Zentangle tile. I tried to make it easy on myself by choosing tangles all based on a grid: Cubine, Dex, and Florez (by Andrea Schuman).


I was pleased enough with the result to try more. I found the central space rather tiny for trying to scrunch three tangles into, so I decided to try two-circle VennTangles on ATC sized paper. For the first, I chose two current favorite tangles, Finery and Coaster (by Carole Ohl). I was pleasantly surprised at how well they mashed together.


I tried to think ahead as to how the two tangles might combine, but I didn't want them to be too similar. I chose a tangle based on a grid and a tangle based on circles: Knightsbridge and Lotus Pods.


Confidence growing, I wanted two really different tangles (at least to my eyes). I've seen and liked the spidery, elegant Efilys (by Sandra Strait) but had never done it before. I chose it and the blocky and child-like Vermal. I prepared for disaster. I drew. Hunh! Not too bad at all!



Using only two circles was going rather well so I decided to take another shot at three circles. But that center really was too small. I used a Zentangle tile again, but this time I used a larger circle template and ran them all off the edge. I chose some simple and fairly basic tangles: Hollibaugh, N'zeppel, and Tipple. It's quite a development from my first attempt!


I found the shading to be very important. For one thing, it can help separate the circles if they flow too much together.

What a marvelous idea! I've discovered a whole new way for tangles to work together! Thanks Patty/ptrish!!! Must. Do. More...