Diva's Weekly Challenge 313: Happy Amanda Day!

This week's challenge is to honor our mother Earth, or Amanda, as the Diva's adorable son Artoo says. What a great challenge! As I write, my dearest Lar is on a bus coming home from the Climate March in Washington, where over 200,000 American earthlings showed their love for the planet. (I'm so proud of him. He left at 3:30 a.m. this morning. 5-hour trip, one-way. I'm hoping it will not be longer coming home! 93 degrees Fahrenheit, 34 Celsius. 8 hours standing, marching, chanting, carrying a banner for NC Climate Justice.)
My tribute to the earth was quite wimpish in comparison! I recycled a frozen pizza box to make my tile. Ta-da. ✊

(I like the color, texture and weight of the cardboard, and have decided that I'll use some of these in my classes to introduce white ink and white charcoal.)

On another note, I completed my first commissioned work this week, a monogram. Here are three versions. Do you have a preference?

Thank you, as always, for stopping by. Have an environmentally friendly week!

Diva's Weekly Challenge #312: "Coffee, Tea or Me?"

This week the Diva has asked us to tangle with a stain for a string. One of my dear friends had her retirement luncheon this week, a pot luck. I've been interested in learning to cook Lebanese and Moroccan food for the past few months, and decided to take a stab at a beet salad with rose water,lemon zest and pine nuts. I'd never stained a tile with beet juice before. (I never have any luck with wine, tea or coffee stains, for some reason unbeknownst to me!) I was so pleased with my beet juice stain I almost left it alone!!! I kept some of the juice, and will definitely do this again!

After three months, I finally finished my review of the 159 Zentangle original patterns this week.  (I'm still missing "Ravel", whose step out I never found.  Please let me know if you know where it is!!)  Using a random number generator, I chose a string from tanglepatterns.com and five or so tangles.  My focus was on the process, the method, rather than the product.  The elegance of limits.  So much freedom to follow your pen and tangle from the heart. I loved this exercise, and highly recommend it, in some form. You might just try it once. You might take your "Top 20 Tangles", à la Michele Wynne's post this week, and use only those. You might do a series using a certain type of tangle--organic, ribbon, grid-based, etc.   Here's my final entry, albeit sans string:

What's your experience with randomly chose strings or tangles?

Thanks for visiting! Have a serendipitous week!

Diva's Weekly Challenge #311: A square and a circle

When I saw this week's challenge to use a circle and a square for the string, I recalled that I had recently renewed my acquaintance with Vitruvius, a Zentangle original, that is simply squares in circles in squares....

Thanks, as always, for visiting. Peace and blessings to you.

Diva's Weekly Challenge #310: Frunky

Welcome back to my journey in the wonderful world of Zentangle!
I thought I'd start this post with some news from the Mosaic app. I love seeing its posts and tutorials from Rick and Maria and feeling like I'm in a class with them. This week, we revisited Crescent Moon. I did these in my "special" sketchbook. I used Prismacolors to get the tan background--Orange espagnol and Lilac--before tangling on top.

Maria challenged us this week to use tangles as strings. I had just finished this Crazy Huggins sampler, also in my "special" sketchbook. (I have a few samplers that I've done to help me remember patterns that I like to use for certain situations. For me, it's a useful tool, since I tend to go blank quite easily!!) I might do this again, with more white space to better highlight the different fills.

Fascinated by some plate-like tiles I've seen on Mosaic that use colored ink tempered with graphite and white charcoal for different tints and tones, I copied one of Maria's, as a study.

Here's where I ended up:

I used my Magnetips pens for the blue, yellow and violet. (The blue one was really light, and I add some Koi watercolor brush and Micron. Oh, well.) I also used zenstone shavings on top of the line work for half of the tiles, in place of the white charcoal. I'm thinking about doing this again with colored pencils to intensify the colors.

If you don't have the Mosaic app, I really encourage you to give it a try! You can get a "lite" version for free, or subscribe for $2.99 / month, or $24.99 / year--less than many Zentangle books, and, for my money, a better tool for studying and deepening your practice.

The Diva' Challenge was to use Frunky, by Katharina Konigsbauer Kolb. I used it in one of the bands on my yellow tile.

Thank you for visiting! Have a colorful week!

Diva's Challenge #309

Noom repus. Sounds so scientific, doesn't it? Flip the letters and you have "super moon"! To answer this week's Diva challenge, I decided to draw Noom on a black tile with a zenstone background. I recently saw someone on Mosaic recycling tiles by covering them with black Permopaque marker and drawing over them with white ink. Intrigued (and frugal with Zentangle tiles!), I realized that I had a stock of tiles I had done in my Intro to Zentangle classes that I no longer needed. Covering them with Permopaque seemed to rough them up enough to really hold on to the zenstone shavings. (File your zenstone on an emery board until you have a tiny pile, then rub them into the paper with the flat end of the stone. Blow away any excess when you're done.)

Last weekend, I took a 2-hour class on making Pysanky, Ukrainian Easter Eggs. These use a batik method, which was totally new to me! Our patient instructor helped me understand the steps for applying the wax and dying the egg, going from light to dark. We used a kristka to apply the tiny bits and lines of melted beeswax at each stage.  As in Zentangle, there are no mistakes! So when a giant blob  of wax dripped onto my thin line, I had to figure out how to incorporate it into my design. :\ 

I used a Sharpie to try to clean things up a bit once I was home. My egg was so dark! Not what I imagined for a symbol of light and renewal!  Now that I have a better understanding of the batik process, I may give it another go later.

To give you a better idea of the beauty and art of Pysanky, I've included some pictures of eggs done by a master craftsman, Henry G., who happened to show up at our class! His talent and experience--over 40 years!--are apparent.

Have you ever tangled an egg? 

Thanks for visiting! Have a joyful and restful week!