Sharing Zentangle

I've had the most wonderful weekend filled with tangling!  

Yesterday I gave a private lesson to a dear friend who has had a stressful year.  It was lovely to sit and tangle with her.  Here are the tiles we created:

I also taught a Zendala class in North Chelmsford.  It was awesome to see how people used the tangle patterns in different shapes.  I hope everyone will share their finished Zendalas with me when they're done!

Zentangle Isn't a Quandary

Life poses a lot of quandaries.  How do we act?  What do we say?  Which choice should we make?

Fortunately, with the Zentangle® method, there are very few quandaries.  Just pick up a pen and tile and start tangling!  No fear, no worries, no expectations.

This week's Diva challenge was to use the new official pattern Quandary.  I've been having mixed feelings about this pattern.  I find that any pattern that looks better with evenly spaced items is a bit tricky for me to do.  Of course that means I'll keep playing with it until I feel more comfortable with the pattern.

I love Carol Ohl's tangled love pattern/string and decided to create a Valentine with variations of Quandary and similar looking patterns.  It's isn't a quandary who I choose as my Valentine each and every year--my wonderful, darling husband.  We haven't been able to celebrate Valentine's Day with our daughter recovering from surgery, so I don't think he'll mind this Valentine being late.

I think my closest Quandary is in the bottom half of the two hearts toward the top.  Maybe it worked for me because it was a smaller space.  :-)

Daring Zendalas

This week's Bright Owl Zendala Dare #45 reminded me of a wreath at first, so I think I intentionally picked tangles that weren't leafy to start.  I ended up with some flowers on the outer edge though.

I was flipping through the Joy of Zentangle book and decided to try a few patterns that were new to me.  I ended up filling the entire tile with patterns from this fun book.  I used Soup Bowls, Floating Discs, Twilight Zone, Flora, and variations of King's Crown and Bubbles.

 

Do I Have To?

I spent a lovely gray day doing something I love.... tangling and sharing the Zentangle® method with others.  I had a wonderful time teaching at the Stevens Memorial Library in North Andover to an eager group of new and returning tanglers.  I made sure to mix up the tangles so everyone would learn patterns that were new to them.

This class had such a wonderful energy with thoughtful questions and focused tangling.

One of the great questions was, "Do I have to divide up my tile?"  There are few "have tos" with the Zentangle method.  I love how freeing this art form is.  The border and string can help take some of the fear out of starting--if a blank canvas is intimidating, break it up into smaller pieces.  If the border and string feel confining, just start tangling anywhere on the tile.  It's up to you how you want to proceed each time you pick up your pen.

I often tangle without the border and string, but sometimes I feel less creative, or my mind is full of thoughts.  During those times, I find the string and border freeing because they help me to get started.  These are tools to help with our tangling, but tools should not become barriers to creating.

The 20+ attendees explored a variety of fun patterns including some of my favorites like Bunzo and Indyrella.  Someone said that a pattern looked like a fingerprint, so I threw in some Seaswirl to add another fingerprint feel.  I love how my lesson plan evolves along with the class and the comments and questions I hear.

I had a fantastic time teaching this class.  Several participants had the best smiles throughout the entire time.  I felt those smiles and swear they popped into my Bunzo and other smiley-looking patterns.  :-)

Thank you to the Stevens Memorial Library and my fellow tanglers for a lovely afternoon.  Here is a sample of the tiles they created.  Some people had to leave early, so we weren't able to capture their beautiful artwork, unfortunately.  Didn't everyone do a great job?

This mosaic includes the finished tile as well as a partial second tile with some more patterns and the option of working with a border and string or tangling freeform.

Valentangling with Teens!

I had fun showing a bit about the Zentangle® method to the teens at Memorial Hall Library during their Valentine's Day party.  We used white MDF words from the craft store and tangled with different colored Sharpies.  We had a lot of fun, and the teens came up with lots of unique patterns.

Didn't they do a great job?

Year of the Snake

For Chinese New Year, the Diva challenged us to create something snakelike for the Year of the Snake.

I created my "snake" string by taking one of my daughter's lacing strings and laying it on my paper.  I roughly traced the outlines.  I decided to play with some scaly patterns for this ZIA and used Bales, Cadent, and Huggins.  I just found an awesome new pattern by Shoshi called Y-Ful Power.  I thought it was a lot of fun to create and to shade.

I filled in my snake shape and shaded to make it rise above the rest a bit.

Sssssss

It's Hip to be Square

This week's Bright Owl Zendala Dare template had a variety of squares and some guitar pick shapes.  I decided to try using the template on a regular Zentangle® tile to keep with the squares.

Most likely from fatigue, I wasn't feeling particularly creative when I picked up my tile, but I hoped that tangling would inspire me.  The squares encouraged me to use some Paradox in a different way.  I tried picking up my pen around the petal/guitar pick shapes, continuing my line on the other side.  I quickly learned that this idea was better in my mind than on the tile as the fun spirals created within Paradox were all hidden!  Oh well, just keep on tangling.

I had thought of doing something roundish in the other shapes, and I knew I wanted to use a red pen.  Valentine's Day might be creeping into my mind this week.  :-)  My pen just connected the lines, so I went with it.

Next up, shading!  I had a lot of fun shading around the boxes and within Paradox.  I love how the boxes look raised or stacked on top of each other with some simple shading.  I wasn't expecting to like that look at all, but I'm glad I was wrong.  My funky Paradox trick didn't work right, but the shading was an unexpected bonus.

If something doesn't turn out like you pictured it in your mind, is that really a bad thing?  Maybe it's just time to think about it in a new way.