Diva Challenge #285: Relax, Bro. And Sis.

Sometimes it’s a good thing to have somebody point out the obvious to you: This week the Diva reminded us Zentangle lovers again that Zentangle is actually about the zen while you “work” and not about the result at the end. While I do know this… I’ll be honest with you: I do care more about the outcome than about the process. Willingly. It’s not that I don’t enjoy the Zen while tangling, that I still have it and enjoy a lot and it is a reason while I enjoy tangling so much. However… if I don’t like my work while I work on it, it spoils the Zen for me. It’s already gotten better, but I don’t think this will ever change for me. By now I almost immediately enter Zen when tangling (at least that’s how it feels like) and even if the flow is broken from stopping after one section of the string, I’ll enter again soon enough. That’s why I don’t fuss over it all too much.

This week’s task, creating a REAL Zentangle therefore was a little difficult for me. But I still managed to come up with something and I think it’s quite interesting. I’ll explain after I have shown you my contribution for this week’s challenge:

Tangles used: B’tweed, Cadent, Courant, Dyon, Florz, Isochor (which I never will get and simply turned into Indy-rella 😛 ), Mooka, Pepper, Tat, Tipple, Verdigogh

When I thought about how to tackle this challenge I remembered that a real Zentangle is not planned. That’s why I took out my copy of One Zentangle a Day (I WILL continue with it, I haven’t given up hope of ever finishing it.. ^^). I once made an index of all the patterns inside (which if you know me by now OF COURSE isn’t yet finished). I numbered all the patterns in the book (there are 67 patterns) and by using random.org I chose the tangles to fill my string. It USED to be a simple string, but I kept on adding and adding new sections because there were some tangles such as Tat that I never tangled before (no wonder it looks the way it does) and which I tried to hide. Which left so much empty space. Which is something I didn’t really like So.. ok, I do admit it: it’s not completele unplanned. But I did my best! And one unplanned thing actually happened which is quite funny: I seperated the “organic” looking tangles from the more “geometric” looking tangles. This was no conscious decision but one of “I guess it’ll lok good next to XYZ”. In the end, too many tangles found their way onto the tile, again, but whatever. I do find this one quite intresting. And I just love Pepper! ❤

Be sure to check out all the other great contributions for this week’s challenge!

I’ll be off now to prepare for INKTOBER – yes, it’s that time of the year again! I already started thinking about a project a few weeks ago and I can’t wait to get started! I’m SO excited to see what great art will be posted next month! If you don’t know yet about Inktober, check out my introduction post from last year. This year I want to finish Inktober, let’s see if I can finally finish something… ^^; If you’re wondering what I’m going to do: You’ll read more about this on October 1st. I hope you’ll check back!

Are you going to play in this year’s Inktober, too? I’d love to hear about it now so I can add you to my watchlist. I’ll be tweeting Inktober art, too, so if you’re interested in it and are not yet @tangleoflines me on Twitter, think about it. 🙂

Diva Challenge #284: Tripoli

Autumn is coming at us and what brings autumn with it: wasps, colds, the flu and all their little friends! (yes, autumn is okay.. but not exactly my favourite season 😉 ) My doctor said that I have a summer flu but I cannot agree, there are signs of autumn everywhere: conkers, the very low temperature in the morning of wonderful warm summer(-ish) days and of course the “autumn pastries” in the shops (that’s what they call gingerbread, spicy Christmas cookies and all the other Christmas pastries nowadays to justify bombarding us with them as soon as it turns September. And when their time has finally REALLY come, it’s sold out. I hate it. But that’s another story).

The upside of being sick (although “upside” might not be right word.. is there an upside to being sick?) is that I can finally write this short post for the Diva Challenge #284. In this challenge the Diva asked us to do a monotangle with Tripoli. What I like about Tripoli is its transformation after shading. Before it already looks nice, but after you shaded it, it gets this whole new look. And it looks like it shimmers.. That is an effect that not many tangles have!
I clearly remember how I struggled with this tangle 2 or 3 years ago and how a tip on a blog somewhere really helped me out (unfortunately I don’t remember where I read it). Until then, I had noticed that a Tripoly circle had 6 elements but I had not looked closely enough how the were spaced and I really strugled with this. Then I read that 3 of the 6 Tripoly triangles form a semicircle and that there is a straight line (kind of) from the edge of the first triangle down the other edge of the last triangle (I do hope this makes sense to you). This really helped me a lot and now I’m pretty confident with this tangle now. Although I rarely use it. I guess there are too many tangles and not enough time avalable to use a large number of tangles a lot.

This is what I came up with for the challenge:

Tangles used: Tripoli (and also some other tangles for filling – I do hope that it still counts as a monotangle? It definitely was an interesting challenge! I used Fassetts, Hypnotic and Pepper)

If you like it, I’d love to read about it! And be sure to check out the other great contributions for this week’s challenge!

See you next time!

Square One – Purely Zentangle focus on BEELINE

Thank you everybody so much for all the encouraging comments in the last post! I treasure each one of them. 🙂 Since this week’s Diva Challenge probably won’t be finished in time, I decided to play on Facebook in the group Square One: Purely Zentangle. For all those of you who don’t know it: It’s a great group with a weekly focus on one specific tangle (although you can post any traditional Zentangle (3,5″ tiles, only black & white) you like there at any time). You’ll find lots of great artwork and new ideas there, so even if you’re not a big fan of Facebook (just like me), it really is more than worth checking it out anyway.

This week’s focus was on the official tangle Beeline. I always liked Beeline, but just as with ING I hardly use it. I was really happy to see it featured for the next few days (the new tangle of the week is always posted on Fridays) and I’m really curious to see als the beautiful artwork everyone is going to post! Since I’ve been tangling a lot recently, I’ve been getting a bit faster tangling and I finally finished a tile (more than) in time to post there for the focus tangle! This is what I came up with:

Tangles used: Beeline, Hypnotic (kind of), Jonqual, Printemps, Sand Swirl, Tripoli, Wheelz, Zinger

In the last two weeks I have hade the feeling that my style is changing a LOT and that I’m kind of improving, getting the hang of some concepts and ideas, that I admired but that were too mysterious to copy for me before. It feels so great and I’m very happy about this progress! One reason for this improvement (apart from the fact that I’ve been tangling all the time which led to much improvement, too) is Eni Oken’s new ebook on Overlapping. I can really recommend this book to you! I have only been able to “work” through it a bit but once I really finished it I think I might post e review of it here. So if you’re not yet sure if you should get it, be sure to stick around.

On the other hand I’m having my difficulties with shading. It’s not that I have no idea about it, but it’s no real fun to me right now and I have so much tangled artwork finished ready for shading, that it’s an even more unattractive thought to go back shading – although I do know that shading is a way to further improve an already beautiful artwork. But it’s just no fun right now.. I guess it’l have to wait until it IS fun again. Until then I’ll think about posting some pre-shading artwork or not.. we’ll sse.

Hope to see you again soon! If you have any ideas, tipps or suggestions, please leave a comment. 🙂