Tangled Trees

That's the title of a large piece of Zentangle inspired art I completed recently. I showed it at a recent weekend art show and sale with a group of artists I work with.

"Tangled Trees" (c) 2013 Margaret Bremner

You can see some of the first tiles here. I just kept going and did many more tiles that could be taken for trunks and branches. Each tile was done individually, without consideration for how, or if, it would link with another tile. Once I had a small stack of tiles completed - probably about 50 - I began to arrange them.

I placed fuller, 'heavier' ones at the bottom, getting lighter going up. I didn't want everything to match spot on. It's more interesting with some breaks and gaps. However, some of the gaps were too much. In those cases I added more tangles, sometimes in gray so they'd seem to be more in the background.

Arranging the paper tiles.

It ended up being six tiles square. I mounted them on a 24" square canvas and tipped and tilted the tiles for some irregularity. I expected simply to paint the background canvas white, but no. Nothing is as simple as you expect! Of course, the Tiepolo paper that Zentangle uses isn't really white, more of a pale cream. So I had to mix paint to match. Well, that was actually simpler than I expected, and I now have a small container of what I'm calling "Meringue" color, should I need more later. Here are two detail pictures.

This tile is in the bottom row, third from the left.

This tile is in the third row, third from the left.

My little corner of the art show and sale. I sold 23 pieces!

I'm thinking of another forest, maybe in browns.