In the Zentangle community, we lovingly refer to patterns as "tangles". This weekend I started thinking about the negative meaning of "tangle": a confused mass of something twisted together, snarl, mass, knot, disorder. I've had some real tangles in the past two years in my relationship with a member of my family. I have felt confused, twisted, uncertain and disordered. Yesterday I received a letter from a dear friend with a prayer to Mary, the Mother who untangles knots. (I had never heard of this particular devotion, but trusted my friend.) As I read, I remembered how I had often untangled knots for my daughter and for kids at school. I also thought back to the frustration of being a kid who hadn't yet acquired the fine motor skills or the patience or perhaps the sense of depth to untangle my knots. Even the Christmas lights last weekend seemed to take forever to untangle. Untangling requires us to see behind, under, through, around.
This led me to try something on a transparent paper. What if I made a design of tangled filaments? I began drawing with a neurographic technique where you place a coin on your paper and, with a pencil, push it across the paper as you try to keep the coin centered on the pencil point. Then you trace over the lines with a pen, thickening some places to form more rounded shapes. (Interestingly, the side I had chosen for the front became the back.)
Here are some other examples of drawing on transparent paper. These all followed the instructions in Project Pack 18.
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