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.

Diva Challenge #361: Amanda Day / Earth Day Year 7

Oh what a week that was.. Lot’s of work and other things on my mind – but the tile for this week’s Diva Challenge still fit in. I’m getting fast and faster and recently I think I took another step forward, I really like almost all of my results! For someone as self-critical as me that’s a HUGE step forward. 🙂 Since I cannot post everything at the moment (see P.S. for the reason), I hope you will believe my word only that this is the 5th week in a row that I can finish the tile in time! This is a new record for me and I hope to keep going and going this year!! Let’s hope that this roll continues and that by the end of the year I can look back on the Diva Challenges of 2018 with an (almost) complete collection! That’s been my goal for several years now but I never came even close to that. Maybe 2018 will be the year!

This week the Diva Laura Harms issued a recurring challenge, it’s Earth Day time again! That means that we’re challenged to recycle something for the challenge. For her tile she used brown paper cut from a pizza cardboard box and the usual pens. I decided to do something similar and as if my mind had unconsciously grabbed the idea, I had on that day – after a long time again – bought a pack of my favourite cookies that I coud use. I wanted to cut as many tiles as possible from that:

After the most economic cutting possible…

… I got two tiles, two ATCs and three Bijous – not bad!

The Diva also used a special string that resembled a sun (or, a quarter sun 😉 ). Again, I decided to mimic her:

My string

Finally, here’s the result:

Tangles used: Agua, Mooka, Opus, Pokeroot, Tripoli, Verdigogh, Zinger

Zen got me there, I honestly wasn’t striving to get such a botanical result but.. it’s so fitting and I really like it! The paper.. I didn’t like nearly as much but in the end – and in true Earth Day spirit – I’ll try to tangle on all tiles/ATCs/Bijous that I got out of the cardboard box. Results will of course be posted here on the blog when I’m finished.

Thanks for stopping by! Don’t forget to take a look at the Diva’s own tile and at what everybody else came up with >>here<<!

P.S.: I still have many more things to post, among them a few Diva Challenges and I hope to finally post them soon. It looks like our internet problems will FINALLY get fixed in less than two weeks and after that I’ll be catching up with a lot of stuff from the last 6 (!!) months including project packs and other stuff, too. Keeping your fingers crossed, too, will help a lot, though! You never know of the Telekom tech will actually show up or not..

Diva Challenge #358: Pickpocket again!

The challenge was just so much fun, so I sat down with another tile featuring Pickpocket (for the first one click >>here<<) and the result after many hours of tangling, colouring and fun is this:

Tangles used: Diva Dance, Pickpocket, Printemps, Verdigogh

I baptised this tangle Pickpocketii PriVerDiDa and it was such fun to tangle, colour (must be the lack of spring) and finally name this tree, too! I hope I’ll get to do more plants of all kinds in the future and have the joy to name them, too.

Be sure to check out the Diva’s tiles and the other wonderful contributions from tanglers all over the world >>here<<.

Have a wonderful sunny Sunday!

Sign of Life

Dear all,

it’s been some time since my last post. Unfortunately, work has had me in a firm grip since the start of the year and February & March were especially intense, thus the long time without any post. I did tangle a bit here and there but mostly I was simply too tired to work on the Diva Challenges or even publish some posts that I had already written in January (and which are still waiting to be published). However, I think that these extreme times are over and that there’ll be more life in the near future.

Here are a few works I tangled since the last post that I like a lot:

Tangles used: Ruutz, Black Pearlz, Printemps, Fassett, Hamail, Wheelz

Tangles used: Ginili, Shattuck

These ATCs I tangled for a swap with a friend over at the German ATC website kakao-karten.de. Actually, only the first ATC was for our swap, the second one was a birthday gift and the first work I used my Finetec colours with. You see the shiny golden Ginili there? The gold was done with one of my Finetecs which are about the same as the Kuretake Gansai Tambi many tanglers are already using. I bought a set at the beginning of the year and I LOVE them! Here’s a picture where you can see their shininess a little better:

Tangling on top is a little hard sometimes since the colour seems to clutter the tip of the Micron a bit, but with a little patience it works just fine. I also think that it’s a perfect match with my latest favourite pattern, Ginili. Isn’t it a wonderful pattern?

Tangles used: Ansu, Fescu, Garlic Cloves, Ginili, Onamato, Pozer, Tipple, Zinger

This next piece I did for my mother’s birthday. My sister and I gave her a trip to Berlin this year since the International Garden Exhibition will be in Berlin this year. The picture is part of our gift certificate (that’s why there’s a lot of empty space at the top). I like the picture overall, although Zinger looks a little blocky here. But I guess it’s ok since I was a little under time pressure and finished it at 3am on the morning I had to send it over to my sister to finish it. 😀 I really like Garlic Cloves here, it’s a great pattern to use for “gardening textures”. The background was done with watercolours. I then tangled on that background and shaded with Polychromos coloured pencils. Shading was a lot of fun here!

Tangles used: Auraknot, Ginili, Hollibaugh, Printemps, Zedbra

My latest piece is a traditional tile and I really love how it turned out! It all started with Auraknot, then Ginili joined in and the challenge was to connect both of them. But Hollibaugh (here with dark and bright “strands”), some smaller Auraknots and Printemps did a good job here, I think. Shading the small Auraknots was a challenge though. But if it’s larger, it doesn’t get any easier, too, and I guess I tend to “overshade” it. I’ll have to do some research how everyone else is shading it! It’s always great to see how others are shading or tangling a particular tangle.

You might have noticed that I didn’t scan the tile as I usually do and post a cropped picture. The reason is that I bought a roll cutter which creates a lovely deckle edge. I SO, SO love it! My scanner, however, is not nearly as thrilled as I am and crops the picture as it thinks is best – without the deckle edges.. That’s why I bought a small easel (like many other tangles already did before me) and will have to post the tiles like this in the future if I want to keep the edges. But maybe you think that’s an improvement? Let me know what you think, I’d love to know! 🙂

That’s it for today, I hope to see you here again soon!

My first Zentangle swap on Facebook!

One reason why it was so quiet here lately (apart from sickness and a busy private life) was that I was working on something big. Not big in the sense of dimensions – although this is on my bucket list, too – but big in numbers. In February, I was accepted into the “Square One: Swap One“-group on Facebook, a large and very active group of tanglers from all around the world. Each month one member hosts a swap and each swap has a special theme chosen by the host. After having seen so many great pictures and posts over the years in other tangler’s blogs proudly presenting their share of the great artwork everybody contributed, I was dying to participate, too. That’s why I jumped right into my first swap there which was the group’s 8th swap. The swap theme was “Hearts & Flowers” and the rules were to use either a heart or flower tangle (or both) on each card and tangle in traditional black & white plus red as a highlight colour (optional). I’m currently sweating a bit because I just re-read the rules for the first time in a few weeks and I think I confused the heart&flower theme – I thought a string in the shape of a heart was ok, too….. Please cross your fingers that my 2 cards without flowery tangles and without a heart-shaped tangle will be accepted…..

Although I was a bit scared of producing a (for me) whopping number of eight cards in 4 weeks, I signed up. Today, 1 day before the deadline, I was finally able to finish my cards and even tangle one for the host. Since the quality of the picture I put on Facebook was so bad, I decided to quickly post some better quality scans here. That’s what I came up with:

Tangles: Printemps

Tangles: Ahh, CO2, Cruffle, Cyme, Join, Printemps

Tangles: Amoeba, Diva Dance (Rock’n’Roll-Version), Hypnotic, Printemps

Tangles: Fission, Join, Meer (tangleation)

Tangles: Cracked, Luv-A, Zinger

Tangles: Join, ‘Nzeppel

Tangles: Flux, Pokeroot, Printemps, Tipple, Zedbra

Tangles: Hypnotic (mixed with Knightsbridge), Knightsbridge, Nekton, ‘Nzeppel (grid-based)

Tangles: Printemps, Tipple, Zenbuds, Zinger

Hope you like them! I’ll post my return cards as soon as they arrive from the USA. Can’t wait to see where my cards will be going to! 🙂

Diva Challenge #254: Valentangles

“Let your love shine in….”

“All you need is love…”

“How deep is your love?”

There are SO many songs about this “crazy little thing called love” and their popularity reaches a peak this week: It’s Valentine’s Day! No wonder the Diva took up this theme and made a challenge out of it: “Create a tile or piece with a Valentine’s Day Flair”. And there are some absolutely gorgeous and love-filled contributions this week, do check them out! (preferrably after reading this post and many leaving a like or a comment 😉 ) I also want to thank everybody who came over here for the last challenge and left a like or even a comment. It’s such a nice feeling to know that there are people out there who appreciate what you’re doing! 🙂

My tile is somewhat typical and not very inventive. However, I love how it turned out (Join is such a lovely pattern!) even though the illusion of depth didn’t turn out exactly as I hoped it would. But to me it looks good and I hope for you, too!

Tangles used: Crescent Moon (heart tangleation), Join, Tipple

I’m not sure, though, that I’ll be tangling a lot more with red. I love the combination of black, white and red SO much but red is so hard to scan! This picture is pretty good now, but it took me quite a few tries to get it up this way…
Join took a bit to practise since I haven’t used it for a long time but I’m really happy how it turned out now. Oh, and I used TanglePatterns String 41 for this tile (I love it, might be doing some more tiles with this string). I’m SO bad at strings so I’m very glad that there’s a resource like that out there.

Enjoy the weekend, have a wonderful Valentine’s Day with all your loved ones and see you next week for a new Diva Challenge!

Diva Challenge #253: New Tangle: Molygon

First of all I want to thank everyone who visited last time and even left a comment. I’m always so happy to read them! 🙂

This week’s Diva Challenge, to use the new official tangle Molygon, came as no surprise since the Zentangle HQ released it only a few days ago. I had lots of fun experimenting with it recently, it’s almost like it is alive and snaking and curling its way all over the paper. And it’s very versatile, too. Although I guessed correctly what the new challenge would be, I’m very late this time “thanks” to a cold I caught last weekend which knocked me out for most of the week. At least I was able to look at alle the other contributions to this weeks challenge and believe me: There’s some REALLY awesome artwork there! Stephanie from Everything is Art shared a pictured from her sketchbook where she illustrated some of the fillings she cam up with. One of them immediately reminded me of citrus fruit slices. So.. I took up this idea from Stephanie’s sketchbook (thank you for sharing, Stephanie!) and this is how it turned out:

Tangles used: Knightsbridge, Molygon

Be sure to check out the awesome artwork of tanglers from all around the world for this weeks challenge, too!

Diva Challenge #246: Save the Trees!

Theoretically, I didn’t have the time for this week’s challenge (I urgently have to tangle the new blog header for winter!), but this week’s challenge really spoke to me so I HAD to squeeze it in before doing other stuff.

The challenge #246 was issued by India’s first CZT, Dilip Patel, who asked us to choose only one tangle of our liking and to tangle a tree with it. I decided to tangle an ATC and chose Diva Dance for my tangle because I love it and think it’s a great tangle for creating bark and foliage alike. However, I’m not sure if my contribution ist really a monotangle because I drew the city in the background.. But I do hope it counts.

Tangles used: Diva Dance (and tangleation)

This ATC was drawn with Sakura Pigma Mikrons in Black, Blue and Green as well as Faber-Castell Polychromos coloured pencils.

Hope you like this week’s contribution! 🙂

Inktober 2015 – An Overview

Inktober was such fun! I really like drawing on a daily basis (for as long as I had the time) and simply loved to follow on Twitter what everyone else did for this wonderful challenge. Unfortunately, I only made it to day 17 of Inktober, I simply couldn’t keep it up any longer. However, this is a lot more than I thought I could do, so I’m still happy and I definitely want to try again next year!

Here I have the overview on all the Bijou tiles with all the Zentangle-inspired drawings I did last month. Although it is strictly speaking only halfway done it’s still a great thing to look at! Which one is your favourite?

I have so many favourites that it would be faster to tell you which ones I didn’t like. But I won’t do that. Inktober is not about critizising but about developing good habits and maybe even seeing some progress in your work. And I’m really satisfied with this last point!

Inktober – Day #17 and: Inktober 2015 is dead – long live Inktober!

Hello again!

In case you are one of the few people who stopped by to visit this blog before, you MAY have noticed that I didn’t post anything for Inktober for more than a week now. This is neither because I didn’t fell like drawing or was already bored with blogging – this is definitely NOT the case! Unfortunately, private life AND work ganged up on me and robbed me pretty much of all my free time. Maybe I could somehow squeeze Inktober in sometimes, but I got so many other things on my list that it would only yield (more) stress rather than work off stress. That’s why I decided to stop after the first half.. However, I still have one last Inktober drawing for you – one of my favourites actually: The Queen of Hearts:

Tangles used: Beadlines, Join

I really like the Queen – although she looks a little too friendly, don’t you think? 😉  Join I definitely have to practice more to make the hearts the same size next time.. But it is a great pattern!

On the bright side, I might have some space now to finally continue with my “One Zentangle a Day”-project. Or time to FINALLY participate in the Diva Challenge. Or to simply empty my jam-packed to-do list which is full of other things… a frightening amount of things with a deadline in the near future. Oh, and if you don’t believe about that ominious list: I’ll show you some of the things that kept me from tangling as soon as I’m allowed to. It’s got nothing to do with Zentangle, but it is about ATCs and other artsy stuff. Hope you’ll enjoy this short diggression, too, until I can finally have some time to tangle in peace and quiet again and have something to show to you. 🙂

However, I’ll still follow Inktober on Twitter and retweet drawings I like for your and my own pleasure. So if you’d like daily updates on Inktober and Zentangle in general: Follow me on Twitter. 🙂

Inktober – Day #16

I was THIS far away from throwing the half-finished piece away since there were just SO many mistakes in the dwarfe’s anatomy… But since I’m so tired and wanted o have the drawing finished already, I just pushed through. I hope I made the background eye-catching enough to distract you from the mistakes.. ^^; Can’t really say I like the dwarf, but I do like the tangled rock in the background (it was supposed to look like the entrance to a tunnel or cave). I tried to make the tonal value darker towards the centre of the tile. Is that noticeable..? See for yourself, here’s my bijou tile for Inktober 16th:

Tangles used: Betweed, Knightsbridge, Munchin, Paradox, River, Tipple, Zedbra

I love the transition between Paradox and Betweed. In a bigger space I can also imagine a “tidier” and really cool transition between Knightsbridge and Zedbra (one of my favourite tangles).

For the next days, I’d like to avoid:

a) men

b) men’s anatomy

c) drawing hands

Let’s see if I can manage to get around all that..

Inktober – Day #15

This is day 15 of Inktober and I’m still in, yay! Now that I’ve come so far I don’t think I’ll drop out now (unless something big happens, but let’s not hope for this). I put all the bijous I’ve drawn next to each other and it’s a magnificient mosaic so far. I won’t post it until the very last day of Inktober, so please wait only a little longer – I’m sure you won’t regret it. 🙂  Today’s portrait takes the idea of tattoos a little further – although you can’t see any here. For me, tattoos and punkers go hand in hand – and of course, the punker has to wear a leather jacket – hello stereotypes… ^^;  Maybe that’s why my brain made me draw a punker from the string I drew this morning? Anyways, here’s my cliché-ridden punker:

Tangles used: Hypnotic, Lightning Bolt, Tipple

I’m already looking forward to seeing what tomorrow’s “person of the day” will be! 🙂