Z

My daughter is the artist in our family. She’s talented, and I’m not just saying that because I’m her mom. I, however, am not. But I’ve been learning Zentangle – “an easy-to-learn, relaxing, and fun way to create beautiful images by drawing structured patterns.” And it is fun and easy and quite pretty. Here are a couple of my recent tiles.

Camelia

Z is for

I haven’t had a lot of practice yet, but I think it’s something I’ll continue to do. I used watercolor pencils on the first tile before drawing the tangles. The second is more traditional. I think I like the simplicity and contrast in the first.

There is a bunch of info on-line about Zentangle, and patterns and strings. I also picked up a book, One Zentangle a Day by Beckah Krahula.

zentangle

Title: One Zentangle A Day: A 6-Week Course in Creative Drawing for Relaxation, Inspiration, and Fun 

Author: Beckah Krahula

Category: Art

Published: November 2012 by Quarry Books

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Add: Goodreads

Purchase: Amazon | Book Depository

One Zentangle A Day is a beautiful interactive book teaching the principles of Zentangles as well as offering fun, related drawing exercises. Zentangles are a new trend in the drawing and paper arts world. The concept was started by Rick Roberts and Maria Thomas as a way to practice focus and meditation through drawing, by using repetitive lines, marks, circles, and shapes. Each mark is called a “tangle,” and you combine various tangles into patterns to create “tiles” or small square drawings. This step-by-step book is divided into 6 chapters, each with 7 daily exercises. Each exercise includes new tangles to draw in sketchbooks or on tiepolo (an Italian-made paper), teaches daily tile design, and offers tips on related art principles, and contains an inspirational “ZIA” (Zentangle Inspired Art) project on a tile that incorporates patterns, art principals, and new techniques

One Zentangle A Day was a perfect choice for me just starting out Zentangling. Zentangle is basically taking a square tile, drawing a squarish border with pencil and a string separating the aree inside the border into section. You then fill those sections with repeating patterns.

The Eleven-Step Zentangle Process

Relax
Breathe
Admire the paper and tools.
Appreciate this opportunity.
Draw the border.
Draw the string.
With the pen, draw the tangles.
With the pencil, shade the tangles.
With the pen, initial the front, and sign, date, and comment on the back.
Reflect and appreciate.
Admire up close and at arm’s length.

I liked working through the daily lessons, learning the tangles, how to weave them together and embellish them. It also explores the use of color and Zentangle-inspired art. It teaches a lot of patterns, and the illustrations were pretty and helpful. I like that it’s an art form any one can do, even me.

If you’re interested in Zentangle, a couple of websites I’d suggest are the official site, Zentangle.com, and TangledPatterns.com.

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