Favourite Tangles

January's challenge (Number 22) for the Chocolate Baroque Zentangle Group has the remit to use your favourite tangles & say why you like to use them.

I tend to gravitate towards tangles based on grids, have a love of Celtic artwork & hence particularly enjoy tangles that weave plus I like to see what effect small variations in the basic tangle pattern can have upon the final result. The three tangles I chose to illustrate these points are:

• Auraknot - a tangle that weaves & can be varied by the number of points that are skipped when constructing the initial aura line. The central star skips one point, the top right skips two points & the bottom left skips three points.
• Hurry - another weaving tangle. In my two examples I varied the number of lines used for each band. The top left star uses three lines & the bottom right uses five.
• W2 - this tangle is based upon a grid & has an over & under weaving effect. I love using this for a background as it balances more intricate tangles beautifully.

tangles: Auraknot, Hurry, W2

close-up central star showing gold 'aura'

My tile was edged with a black marker (Memento) prior to mounting onto a larger square of black cardstock with rounded corners. A Faber-Castell Polychromos pencil with a dry paper stump was used for shading & a Sakura Metallic Gelly Roll gel pen for the gold 'aura'.

Zentangle Inspired Christmas Cards

These are my two submissions for The Diva's Weekly Challenge #148: "Merry Happy" where her brief is:

"In the spirit of the Holidays, this week's challenge is to create a piece or tile for your own holidays. Whatever you celebrate, however you celebrate."

My two cards have basically the same layout but didn't start off that way. Both, however, were the result of persevering & finding a way round mishaps (or perhaps I should say opportunities since there are no mistakes in Zentangle).

tangles: Huggins, Hurry

The first was going to be a large ZIA (Zentangle Inspired Artwork) simply matted on gold cardstock before mounting onto a card base. I'd tangled all of it including a wide frame of Meer & had shaded the Huggins (using Derwent Coloursoft pencils with a paper stump & Sansador) when I stopped to sort out the sponges in the little pot I use for keeping a small amount of the Sansodor for dipping my paper stumps into. In so doing a drop of Sansodor landed on my artwork but thankfully only on the frame portion. Chopping off the frame meant that I had a square slightly smaller than a Zentangle tile which I mounted onto a 4 inch square of black cardstock with rounded corners. The snowflakes are die-cuts (using Spellbinders Shapeabilities Create-A-Flake Three). The stars were drawn using a Pinflair Stepper Template.

tangles: Cruffle, Flux

The second card uses an Official Zentangle Tile edged in black ink (Memento Tuxedo Black Dual Marker) mounted onto a 4 inch square of black cardstock with rounded corners & another 4 snowflakes as in the first, red cardstock instead of gold & a black card base. My mishap here occurred as I was going to shade the leaves using a single green Derwent Coloursoft pencil with the paper stump & Sansador. Despite heat setting my Sakura Pigma Micron penwork it smudged badly whereas in my first card it had not. The only difference between the two was my substrate: in the first W H Smith 220gsm white cardstock & in this one the official tile. I salvaged the tile by layering 3 shades of green pencil to achieve the shading of the leaves. I was rather pleased with the result for the baubles really gained definition against the brightness of the leaves. A white gel pen was used to add highlights on the berries.

inside of cards

Both cards have the same internal design - a simple white die-cut (Spellbinders Nestabilities Labels Sixteen) edged with the Memento Tuxedo Black Dual Marker forms the message panel.

Crosshatched Background & Chocolate Baroque Hand Challenge

Links: Chocolate Baroque Hand Challenge, Glenda Waterworth, MCC (My Creative Classroom), Marie Browning

When I saw Miranda's Henna Hand on the Chocolate Baroque  Design Team Blog I thought of tangling a hand as I'd seen several examples in Suzanne McNeill's Zentangle 4 but, since I was just starting the MCC tangling course, I filed the idea at the back of my mind.  Inspired by Miranda's artwork, Glenda has now posted an open Hand Artwork Challenge on the Chocolate Baroque Forum (free to join) which I thought I could combine with the third week's pencil crosshatched background technique. With hindsight I'm not so sure that was a good idea.

tangles: Hurry, Sand Swirl
Derwent Coloursoft Pencils crosshatched background on
Canson XL Series Mix Media 98lb/160g paper 

I'm rather ambivalent about this piece of artwork as the finished piece reminds me too much of a mummified hand & the patterning is much too life-like in terms of fingerprints for comfort. The latter is quite symbolic actually for I drew round my own hand & both the little fingers are crooked - an inherited characteristic from my mother's paternal lineage.