It’s a String Thing #249 – One for the Diva

First time to enter Adele Bruno’s It’s a String Thing challenge! I’ve never managed to squeeze the tile in, but this time it worked. When I read that this challenge is (kinda) one for the Diva, Laura Harms, I immediately sat down and finished the tile in one go. Laura and Adele both are a huge inspiration by giving out (almost) weekly challenges which are a lot of fun. It’s a great commitment that takes a lot of time so it’s a real blessing to have them both!

Abeko was new to me (I had seen it many times but never used it), but Diva Dance, of course, is one of my go-to tangles.

Tangles used: Abeko, Diva Dance

Challenge #249 runs until Saturday evening, so if you want to enter, you still can! >>Here’s the link<< to Adele’s blog post with the challenge.

If you’re going to enter: Have fun!

Oh, and while we’re at it: This weekend will be LOTS of fun since I’ll be going to a big Zentangle meetup here in Germany! And I’m really looking forward to meeting Christina from Windspiel.art again. 🙂 So I guess there’ll be a lot to post about next week and lots of new artwork – quite likely including the beginning of my endless Zentangle project.

Hope to see you next week then!

The Endless Zentangle Project

A few weeks ago, one of my favourite Tanglers, Anica Grabovec, started a project called “The Endless Zentangle” and posted about it on Facebook. Its basically a little book with Zentangle tile size pages made of one veeeeeery long strip of paper folded like an accordion. Each week, you are to complete one “page” of it, always overlapping a little onto the next page. It looked like a lot of fun! But since I always start on projects but somehow almost never get to finish them, I discarded the idea of participating and forgot about it.

However, yesterday on Instagram I came across the project again and WOW… there was such amazing artwork there! I immediately got hooked and started to dig out information about the project. I soon found out that the challenge for this project seems to have come from a super-talented Russian tangler I had never heard of before, Natalie Plechkova. Unfortunately that means that pretty much all information on this project are in Russian. Google translate does help – but only when you’ve found an entry or a post about it… Let me help you here. 🙂

• The best starting point if you want to participate would be Natalie Plechkova’s blog post about the challenge. There she also links to the weekly posts about the challenge.

• For some inspiration you can go to her Instagram account or search for #the_endless_zentangle or the Russian counterpart.

It feels like this project opens up a whole new part of the Zentangle community that I haven’t been aware of yet. So much new, gorgeous artwork to find, that’s really cool! However it’s a little sad that there’s this language barrier.. So.. If you’re participating or have found a cool post about it: Please leave a comment here! I’d love to check out what you found.

Maybe one day I’ll start such an accordion folded book, too! The project is definitely intriguing! But until then there’s still so much to finish first, hehe. Ooooops… XD

P.S.: The lovely Christina from W wie Windspiel was so sweet to craft me a ten page leporello from Fabriano tiepolo today! She made one for herself, too, and next week when we FINALLY meet again she’ll bring it along. She posted both hers and mine (the dark one) on Instagram – haven’t they turned out BEAUTIFULLY?! I’m really motivated to try to match the content of the book with its beautiful outside. THANK YOU so much, Christina! ❤

Diva Challenge #359: Finger Stringer (or something like that)

Back in April, the Zentangle Diva Laura Harms issued a challenge called “Finger Stringer”. The task was use our fingers in an “interesting” (thats what she said) way to create a string for us to tangle in.

Well, I tried to tackle that challenge. However, I’m not 100% sure if the two tiles I do qualify since I only tangled AROUND my hand. But almost as soon as she wrote the word “interesting” my mind was set to do something that would incorporate my other big hobby next to tangling/drawing: the game of Go (or 囲碁 (jap. igo), 圍棋 (chin. wéiqi) or 바둑 (kor. baduk).

+++ Little note abot Go, if you know it already or are not interested, please feel free to skip it +++

Probably you’ve heard from it, there has been QUITE a bit of a ruckus the last two years because AlphaGo revolutioned computer Go and the wayartificial intelligence work. Go basically is a 4,000 year old game originally from China. It’s played by two people alternately playing black and white round pieces on the intersections of a grid of 19×19 lines (other sizes are used, too, especially by beginners). To win you have to surround more free intersections than the other player. To check out the basic rules, click here. It’s such a deep, challenging and interesting game! And, just like in Zentangle, it sometimes allows me to zone out completely as I only focus on the board and the moves being played to find the best possible counter to an opponent’s move (within the range of my poor abilities XD). I’ve been playing for.. almost 15 years now, I think, and it is the only game so far that never gets boring.

+++ End of Go-related infos +++

Well, anyway.. this is my response to the Diva’s challenge:

Tangles used: Diva Dance, Button

Tangles used: Diva Dance

Especially the second tile is among my all time favourite tiles, I’m really happy how both of them turned out! It’s such a simple and obvious thing to do, but without the Diva I’d never have thought to do it. So, THANKS a lot for the inspiration, Laura!

Please also check out the wonderful artwork the Diva and everyone else did for this challenge by going to the Diva’s blog post!

This challenge inspired me to “go bigger” and tangle a mosaic of a whole board one day. I already laid it out on one of our Go boards: I’d have to tangle 25 or (rather, to have some kind of border going round) 30 tiles fo that. Wow.. that surely feels like a daunting task! But one step at a time… it might work out. I already picked the game, too, it’ll be Honinbo Shusaku’s famous ear-reddening-game from 1846. Hmm… or maybe an interesting game from my most favourite today’s professional player, Iyama Yuta? Hmmm….. You see, I still have to work out a few things until I can get started! Anyways, I’d just LOVE to hang it in our flat (which since we moved in definitely lacks some pictures on the wall). As soon as I start I’ll keep you up to date with my progress. Giving updates and seeing how I progress here will definitely motivate me to keep going.

Have a nice weekend!

Still waters run deep

A short post for a little something I did today:

Tangles used: Crescent Moon (like it a lot for the first time ever woohooo!), Diva Dance & Tipple

I really like it a lot, it even looks a liiiiiiiiitle bit like something one of my favourite tanglers, Margaret Bremner, could have done. Just a little bit.

My unconscience played me a neat trick here because only a few hours before I first put pen to paper on this tile I started watching Avatar – The last Airbender (the cartoon series) and the first part is all about waterbending (that is controlling the element of water so it can be manipulated at the Avatar’s / waterbender’s will). So… I guess I might have to do a tile for earth, wind and fire, too, as the series progresses.. We’ll see! It’s a lovely series and it would be cool to have a little element set for myself.

The downside is that the tile literally took half the day to tangle and colour in.. Hope to get faster here soon! For this tile I sued some watercolour base (Schmincke Horadam) and then my trusty Faber-Castell Polychromos. It somehow felt right to use them here and not my new love, the Caran d’Ache Luminance (there’s always next time!).

Have a nice week!

Just for fun

Cause that’s what it’s all about. 🙂

Tangles used: Button, Pokeleaf, Printemps, Shattuck, Tipple, Tripoli

I took up the Earth Day Challenge that was recently issued by the Diva Laura Harms and cut a tile from a supermarket tomato packaging that was lying around. Really lovely paper I must say! Won’t be the last project on that paper (more tomatoes have been bought already ^^).

This is also the first project I did using the set of 20 Caran d’Ache Luminance pencils a friend gave me for my birthday a few months back. They’re at least as lovely as they are pricey! One of those supercreamy-soft pencils costs at least 3€, so… you can imagine how very nice they must be then. All of them are extremely lightfast (something which can by no means be taken for granted) and the colours are brilliant and absolutely magnificent! I’m definitely in love and already bought a few additions. ❤ And well… I guess I can't rest until one day I caught oh… I mean until I bought them all.. ;-D

My new tangle: Ann

We’re back online!!! To celebrate this I want to publish a post I have already written quite some time ago and I hope you’ll enjoy it!

I’ve waited quite a bit for this moment and now the time’s come to present to you my new tangle: Ann! Since I discovered Zentangle back in August 2011 I always wanted to invent or deconstruct my own tangle that I’m proud of because I think no one has thought of that idea before**. However, I’m not that inventive. I always need a point to start from and seeing that huge mass of already deconstructed patterns is always quite intimidating, too. So.. where to start? Some day in Spring 2017 I remembered IX, a tangle, that is based on a letter – I thought that might be something that I could try. Quite fast I settled on the letter N and the first four steps from the step-out below came to me pretty fast, too. But something was missing. I couldn’t point a finger at it, but it just wasn’t finished yet. However, I was at a loss for the last step.

The final form of Ann was found back in June 2017 (yep, I’m quite slow posting about it XD) when I sat down with my friend and fellow tangler Christina from W wie Windspiel to tangle in an Asian restaurant after a Zentangle meeting. I showed her what I had come up with and after discussing a few ideas she suggested adding a Cubine-like “window” between the N-starting-shapes. It immediately felt perfectly right and the final step from the following step-out was added. I was really happy that finally I had found what I was looking for. Now it was perfect! Still, there was one issue left: the name. But here my friend was a great help again. Due to the tangle being based on the letter N, she suggested the name this tangle has today. It was just perfect! I had never seen a tangle like this before* and I’m still very happy with it.

I already have deconstructed the tangle Sweaf, but like Printemps, we never came to develop some kind of long-term relationship. It’s nice but… actually not my kind of favourite tangle. It’s different with Ann, though. I love it and it has become one of my go-to tangles since it’s deconstruction a few months ago.

I won’t bore you any more with details, here are the step-outs to tangling Ann:

 

Here are a few tips for tangling Ann:
1. To make the tangle more lively, try tangling the N-shapes in different sizes, draw curved lines instead of straight ones and vary the spacing between the Ns.

2. You can draw the two “teeth” (they do look a bit like a vampire’s cuspid, don’t you think?) in step 3 either as one line (going back and forth) or as two lines. I  prefer 2 lines and to turn my tile in a way that the “tip” of the two “teeth” is pointing to me so that I can pull the pen towards me.

3. You CAN start drawing the inner line of the out “tooth” in the center (step 3). However, I think it looks more interesting if you don’t start in the middle but a little off – you can vary the look here very nicely, too.

4. You can either fill in the inner “tooth” or the outer one (like in the deconstruction above) of Ann – or maybe you even come up with another variation?

5. For the Cubine-like “window” first draw the diagonal lines from two or three corners towards the center, then connect them by drawing a line that’s parallel to the shape it’s drawn in. Or maybe drawing the diagonal lines from all for corners is interesting, too? (is this a window/hole then, or a lifted area? You decide by shading it accordingly!) Or changing the corners from where the diagonal lines are drawn towards the center?

And here are a few tiles I tangled with Ann:

Some colour involved 🙂
Tangles used: Ann, Fengle

My first try on Margaret Bremner’s rope string.
Tangles used: Ann, ING, Paradox, Tipple, Tripoli, Zedbra

Ann as a border on a 3Z
Tangles used: Ann, ‘nzeppel

Ann as a border on a Zendala
Tangles used: Ann, Fife

A little black & white Bijou
Tangles used: Ann, Crescent Moon

Now, this is really exciting for me, I cannot wait to see what tanglers from all over the world will do with Ann! If you tried it and published a tile with Ann, I’d really love to see it! Please link to it in the comments or drop me a message on Twitter and I’ll come and pay a visit.

Happy tangling and hope to see you soon!

Yvonne

** As I said, I’m not aware of any pattern that is just like Ann and at this point I’m quite certain that it is unique. However, it’s impossible to know all patterns and tangles in the world. If you’ve already seen this pattern somewhere before, I’d appreciate it if you’d drop me a message with a link to it.