Ellish

I hope all our Canadian friends had a great weekend and enjoyed Canada Day yesterday. I had marked it on the calendar so I knew we wouldn't see the challenge until today.

I keep trying to get some of my friends interested in the Zentangle® Method. This week I had some friends round and I talked them into trying it out. I had previously explained about the Zentangle® Method and shown them how we usually draw borders etc. However on this occasion I drew a string on some tiles and showed them how to fill them with Knightsbridge, Florz and Tidings. When everyone was finished we fitted them all together in an ensemble and then I surprised them by adding a Dragons head which I did before they came. I think they were quite impressed that they had made a Dragon out of such simple tiles, but sadly I don't think any of them were interested enough to do any more in the future:-( It is a shame because I would love to have a real live Zentangle friend. Oh well, at least I have all my world wide friends to talk to here.

The Diva's Challenge this week is to use the new official tangle pattern Ellish. As The Diva mentioned some people have been using it on the Mosaic App for a few days now. Maria herself started it by posting a beautiful Ellish she had drawn. Then she started to 'alphabellish' as she called it. She posted an A-ish, then a Bee-ish. Now most people know me as YT so at this point I couldn't resist  jumping on the bandwagon and drew this YT-ish lol. 

Anyway Maria has posted many more beautiful letters of the alphabet which she has drawn in an Ellish manner and I am sure she must have finished the whole alphabet at home by now. She invited everyone to join in by using the hashtag #alphabellish.

This is the Ellish I have drawn for the Diva's Challenge today:-

Roman Numeal XIV

So here we are at XIV ! Joey did say at the start that she was going to end at XIV, but I don't know if she still means that or if she is going to go further. There is a nice mixture of tangle patterns to choose  from and I decided to stick with just four of them. I did large Bunzos on one side and small Bunzos on the other, along with three variations of Cadent and a triangular rolling Barberpole in the X.

I have more or less run out of tiles and have decided to use my sketch book for the challenges in future. I can draw in the tile, as many others do, and the sketch books are a lot cheaper than the tiles. I will get more tiles, but keep them for special projects.

Here is my Zentangle® for Joey's Challenge this week.

Roman Numeral XIII

A low 13 string lol ! This is for Joey's Roman Numeral Challenge. I have been a good girl and not used an eraser, however tiles no. 1 & 2 did go in the rubbish bin !! I don't find Verigogh easy. I see other people make lovely branches from it and also beautiful feathers using it but mine remain basic no matter how much I practise, so in one tile I just make the X from two of the pine needles and a berry and for the other tile I just dangled the tip of it in from the top.

I have been meaning to try Ipso for a while now so this was a good opportunity. Sadly I couldn't really work out from the step out exactly where you are meant to thicken the line so I don't really think it is drawn as it should be. For the ruffles I decided to draw half cruffles in both of the tiles.

Here are the two tiles which didn't go into the rubbish bin and I am calling a halt :-) I am now looking forward to seeing what artistic things everyone else has done with these tangles.

Calling all Trekkies and Whovians

I must have had a rush of blood to the head this week because my tangling has been a bit zany. I have mentioned before that I am a Sci Fi addict. I am talking real Science based Sci Fi here, not that fantasy stuff they now lump into the genre these days.

Do you remember my holiday where I photographed the Star Wars set in Ireland that you needed a magnifying glass to see anything? Well the Irish newspapers have now been busy with their cameras trying to get pictures, but due to the guards around there they are having about as much luck as I did. In fact mine is more artistic because of the pottery Greek urns in the foreground. Honestly sea, cliffs, Greek urns and Star Wars, it could only happen in Ireland lol ! The actors have started to arrive and next week they are even closing down the air space around there while they film, talk about paranoid!!

Anyway when I sat down to tangle the other day, and was trying to think of a string, I suddenly thought a Star Trek logo/communicator outline would make a good string. How could I have not thought of it before?

I used one of the new official tangles - Patena - in the background and then I realised it looked just like the communicator was caught in the Q Continium ( you need to be a ST Next Generation fan to understand that bit !)

That all set off a train of thought. I remembered Maggiebee saying she was a Dr Who fan and I thought I should do a tile for her and any other Whovians out there. After all Dr Who began my interest in Sci Fi as a 9 year old child, stereotypically hiding behind the sofa for the frightening bits. Then I started reading books like John Wyndam's Day of the Triffids etc. and when Star Trek began three years later it, along with my Arthur C Clarke books, moved my Sci Fi interest on out into Space.

So here is my Dr Who tile, for

Maggiebee the Whovian Zentangle Zealot :-)

(And that DW Tardis/logo shape is not easy to replicate!)

On to the next zany tile. Our Ol' Queenie turned 90 yesterday which set off yet more great celebrations. She really is amazing, how she still stands there at functions shaking a million hands I don't know, I have trouble standing for ten minutes without getting backache and wanting to sit down - and I am only 60, what I will be like in 30 years time I dread to think. Anyway whilst I was watching the celebrations on the TV (all horses and boring as heck, but I suppose she enjoyed it) I drew this ZIA with her in mind. I used the tangle pattern Eez for Elizabeth to outline the 90, then set off Fireworks around it and drew Crowns in the bijou sections below. (I had intended to draw three different tangles in the bijou areas but got a mental block when trying to think of other patterns with Queenly connections so stuck with the three crowns.)

Now here we are at the Diva's Challenge where she has suggested we introduce some black. I have just started practising black pearl tipple on a black background and decided to do a tile introducing black that way. I have used the back of a Zentangle® tile because they are too hard to obtain in Ireland to waste the space by just signing your name on the back ;-) 

 

Roman Numeral XII

I really enjoyed doing this Knightsbridge Monotangle for Joey's Roman Numeral Challenge. At first sight the Knightsbridge tangle pattern seems a bit basic but there are so many different ways to draw it. One of my favourites is not featured on the Enthusiastic Artists's study ( how does she produce so many varieties!) I like to draw it with highlights and shading so that it looks like rods or barrels, so I have done that twice here, once with straight lines and once with wavy lines. I wanted to try out Knightspeek, but ran out of room. I will have to practise it elsewhere.

Pokeroot and Drupe

I am just back from a wonderful day out. It was forecast to be a hot sunny day and so it turned out. We wanted to explore a new area, about an hour away, to try and find some good parking spots from which we can set off on walks. If we could explore the area today we would be all set for walks during the coming summer.

The area is called the Slieve Gullion Forest and is just over the border in Northern Ireland. It was weird being back in the United Kingdom again. We stopped first in the main Forest car park where there is a little shop, as I wanted to buy some crisps to add to our lunch ( I love crisps squished into a sandwich, do you?) When I came to pay I suddenly realized I needed Stirling and I had left my English purse in the car! It is so weird needing two purses, after all we were only an hour away from home - and yet home is in another country!

Anyway we sorted it out and moved on to find somewhere as a base for walking. We followed a single track road through the forest and up the mountain and finally came across - a fire engine!!!

Well we had not expected to find that up a little single track forest road!! Goodness knows why it was there as I have never seen one in a forest or on the moors in 50 years of walking. It made me think of those terrible fires over in Canada that the Diva mentioned. We do see the odd fire at certain times of the year, but those are controlled burnings by land owners or rangers, not bush fires gone wild.

There were wonderful views 

and then as we walked into the forest we came across this little waterfall.

I got all excited when I saw this:-.

I thought I had found Shamrock growing in the wild, but it turned out to just be wood sorrel :-( Apparently Shamrock is similar but has much smaller flowers. Oh well, better luck next time.

Fortunately The Diva and her family are safe, and hopefully far enough away from the fires, so she was able to set us another Challenge for this week. For my duotangle of Pokeroot and Drupe I decided to draw a huge Pokeroot and put Drupe into it with both black and white Pokeroot drooping out of the Drupe. (Did you see what I said there :-) I had intended to use a third black drupe band around the edge to make the large Pokeroot, but when I did this the huge Pokeroot disappeared so I left it with just the outline.

By the way, there has been an update to Zentangle's Mosaic App and it now has a Tangle Step-Out section - Hurrah :-) These are official Zentangle tangle pattern step-outs, so far only 20 of them, but I am assuming more will be added in future updates. Beside each title is the name of the person who deconstructed it and also the person who named it, which is quite interesting.

Also this week I suddenly remembered my dice and Zentangle legend from the starter box and this is what I did in my sketch book. You would be amazed to know that #11 - Hollibaugh - came up 9 times! I only used it in three sections and rolled again for the rest. Maybe it was trying to tell me I should do a monotangle lol.

Roman Numeral Xl

I had a bit of a problem finding the step-outs for this week's Roman Numeral Challenge. Two of them were on Pinterest and I don't have an account. I managed to find the step out for Vachel on Genieve Crabbe's blog but was unable to find Shons anywhere else. As I didn't want to create an account just for this I just used Susa, Zippa and Vachel. They were all rather large tangles so I just took the diamond fragment from Zippa for the side of the tile. I even left off the top and bottom of the string to make more room as I was struggling to fit things in.

Crux

At long last the weather is good enough to get out into the garden. We had our back garden done so that it is low maintenance but nevertheless we still need to tidy it up. At least there is no lawn to mow anymore. We love the sea and anything to do with the beach, so that was the theme we went with. We even had the shed at the bottom made to look like a beach hut and we are in the process of doing the inside up with all the gear a beach hut would have.

I finally exhausted myself and came in to do the Diva's Challenge. At first I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, I tried it out using Maria's 'Graphite Is The New Black' method :-

Then I did a Zendala using Crux with a little Zinger on a tan tile and I enjoyed this one much more. In fact it almost looks like flowers on a garden trellis so the garden must have inspired me :-)