Ionic

Oh my goodness, the tangle chosen for this week's Tangle Me 3 Challenge is Ionic. I say 'Oh my goodness' because this tangle was invented by the Queen of Variations herself, Margeret Breamer - otherwise known as The Enthusiastic Artist.

On the step out she has already shown 5 variations, but I thought I must step up to this Challenge and think of two more variations other than those listed and this is what I came up with. The centre tangle is of course Ionic itself, then in the first circle the outer curls droop downward into a sort of fescu, and the curls in the outer circle curl inwards rather than outwards.

Maryhill

Well, as Joey says in her Weekly Challenge, this is a very interesting tangle and great to use in a Monotangle. I drew the first segment and I thought, "no, this can't be right" but then as I went further the eye started to see the windmill shape and it appeared out of nowhere. I loved drawing this and will definitely use it again.

For the smaller circle I used the Derwent Graphik Sepia Pen and for the larger circle I used the Micron Sepia pen. For those of you who read my post last week comparing pens, this is the difference in colour that I mention between the two pens. Although they are both labeled Sepia, I consider the Micron sepia to be very dark. (I know colours on different computers are not as in real life, but you will be able to clearly see there is a marked difference between the two).

At a Loss for Tangleations

I really thought I wasn't going to be able to enter this week. No matter how hard I tried I couldn't think up anything new to do with Kinetic. Kinetic is pretty frenetic by itself :-) Anyway I woke up in the middle of last night and there it was, a variation and of course one thing led to the other thing and now I have my three Kinetics for Suzy Mosh's Tangle Me 3 Challenge! Great to see that Suzy's artistic block is flowing again too:-)

I put the original on the LHS, a circular one top RHS and a sort of grid free kinkier one lower RHS. It was the grid free one that came to me in the middle of the night in case you were wondering lol.

From Phicops to Philip

Tangleations for me doesn't just mean tangles combined, but also the stupid words the Spell checker comes up with when I try to write tangle names. It drives me nuts, as I have to constantly correct the spell checker Grrrr.... ! For example Paizle becomes Paisley (which I suppose is probably what was in the mind of the person who christened it), Phen becomes Phew, and Phicops insists on being Philip of all things! Jujubeedze becomes judge-edge, which doesn't even make sense! I have had some really hilarious ones, but of course now that I am blogging about it, and want to make you laugh, I can't remember any of them. Have you had any incidents with Tangle names?

This week on Diane and Carolein's Triple Alphabet Challenge the letters are PIJ. I chose Jalouise, Purk, Pookroot and Inapod and for a string I used two of Margeret Breamer's Birds.

Dawn

It is dawn here in this neck of the woods, and there is a beautiful sky full of Reds, Pinks, Grey, White and Blues. We used to say "red sky in the morning sailors warning", but that doesn't seem to apply anymore as the sky seems to be red most mornings these days. It must be pollution I suppose, causing it to happen everyday. Whatever the cause they are beautiful to look at. Do you have frequent red sunrises in your part of the world?

For Tackle It Tuesday this week I have chosen a Jettie (lovely tangle, one of those irresistible ones :-) Jalouise, Jax (it was interesting trying to use it as a filler rather than a long ribbon) and Jonquil. I saw this twisted version of Jonquil done on Facebook's Square One and was rather taken with it. I used to think Jonquil was a boring tangle but not now.

A Plethora of P's.

I am still enjoying my Derwent Sepia pens which I was given last week. Ecshelton was asking if I preferred the Derwent Graphik Line Markers or the Micron colour range. First of all I have to say that I am not a great fan of the Micron pens, simply because there is a sharp uncomfortable ridge just where I like to put my fingers when I hold the pen. From that point of view alone the Derwent Graphik Black and Sepia pens win hands down. They come in a variety of sizes and I prefer the tone of the Derwent Sepia pens, the Micron Sepia is a little dark in my opinion.

However when it comes to the coloured versions it is a slightly different story. The Derwent Graphik Coloured Line Markers only seem to come in size 0.5, which is a little large for me apart from blocking in. I don't know if the Micron Coloured pens come in smaller sizes but I only have the 0.5 size for these too. For colouring I prefer the Micron pens. The Derwent coloured pens has very gluppy ink which comes out in globules at times and at other times runs dry. It has a ball bearing in it and you have to shake it to get it going again, or press the tip and then a whole load of ink comes out:-( There are twenty colour choices in the range and have marvellous names for the colours, Billy for one of the blues, Rain for the purple, and Tickled for - yes you guessed it - the Pink lol.

So overall if I had to choose between them I would choose the Derwent Pens as they are so much more comfortable and I use the black and sepia ones more frequently than the coloured pens.

P is the letter of the week for SuzyMosh's New To Me Challenge. There is a plethora of P tangles to choose from, 3 pages on Tanglepatterns.com in fact! I have already used most of the official Zentangle® P patterns, the old favourites like Pokeroot/leaf, Purk, Pendrills, Pepper etc. All had to be left behind but still there were plenty of others to choose from. I chose just three, all of which are new to me, Paizol, Podz and Pippin. I shall use all of them again, but I didn't get Pippin quite right. I started with each pippin in a different place and then filled in, but i now realise it needed to begin in one place and circle outwards. I will know next time. This tile is a bit 'Meh', I would do it again but I must get on with other things today:-)

A New Hobby is Great/Sad

(Spoiler Alert P1 & P3. Sorry I forgot to put it on Mr Linky).

It is great to have a new hobby, but it often means that it is all consuming and older hobbies get put to one side which is sad. One of my other hobbies is cross-stitching, although I haven't done any for weeks now.

It has crossed my mind that tangling could be done in sewing. I was particularly thinking that Blackwork is like tangling. This last week I thought it would be nice if I could somehow marry up the two hobbies..

My favourite cross-stitch charts were made by Lavender and Lace. You may know of them or even used them yourself. The one I love the most is this one called Guardian Angel:-

I am not a religious person, in fact rather the opposite, but I just loved the thought of a Goddess or Guardian Angel holding the world in her hands like this.

I took the photo of it, then traced an outline around it and transferred it to my sketch book like so:-

I then set about tangling it and this was the result. I was quite pleased for a first attempt and hope to refine it as I attempt more of them.

Now to the Diva Challenge this week. I was thrilled to see it is Holly Atwater this week and her audio meditations. I actually discovered them about four weeks after I first found this hobby and thought they were marvellous. They focus more on the meditative side of the Zentangle® Method which was marvellous for me as I have no access to a CZT at the moment. (Spoiler alert for no.3 if you click on the link in the following sentence) You can read my post about it here, I think I said most of what I thought in that post. I am really looking forward to further mediations when Holly's life calms down a bit.

I did all three meditations at the time, but I redid the first one again today. As I had done them previously I also did the Betweed challenge and included a different version of the Tripoli tangle pattern we were taught in the meditation. Here are the two results:-

From Dry to Wet.

Wow, 24hours ago August was the driest month this year in my neck of the woods. I have a rain gauge in the garden and a rain app on my iPad to log the amount of rain. However everything has changed, we had 58 millimetres of rain all in 24 hours and it is now the wettest month of the year!

When it is wet it is best to stay indoors and tangle. Linq is the subject of Joey's Weekly Monotangle Challenge this week. This is a great one for trailing through a tile like a ribbon, but I find it difficult to know how to display it to advantage on it's own. I've thrown a bit of colour into it to brighten it up.

Differences

I have just been looking at Diane and Carolien's tiles for the KAT challenge this week. They are lovely, but the thing that struck me is they have decided on similar tangles, similar colours and yet they are not the same result, they do not look alike. It always amazes me how the subject of a challenge is the same for everyone, and yet no matter how many entries no two will be the same.

Here is my tile for this week, another in my Sepia series. I used Knase, a quarter swirly Arukas, Angelfish, Antidots, Tripoli and Tidings. I used a brown coloured pencil to shade with and a blue Micron pen for the swirl in Tidings.

Sepia

I seem to be having a sepia week. I have been using the set of Derwent Sepia Graphik pens which I was given for my birthday last week and I do like the effect. I am using some card stock, which I have in various shades, to cut up into tiles. I particularly like this pale cream coloured card in conjunction with the sepia. I also have some coloured Micron pens which I was able to order from Amazon and thought a hint of blue might go well with the sepia to make it interesting.

I is the string this week for Tackle It Tuesday and I drew a nice thick capital I (with crossbar at top and bottom) down the centre of the card and filled it with Ing. Unfortunately when I added the other tangles the I disappeared unless you look really hard. Still a string is meant to disappear isn't it! On one side I used Cresent Moon and on the other side I used Ix I used a brown coloured pencil to shade. I really enjoyed drawing this, I like aura type tangles, and I have to say I am very pleased with the result :-)

My Week 11 - Colds

I'm feeling sorry for myself, I've got a dreadful cold, cough, sore throat, my voice has gone and I ache all over. Where I managed to pick a cold up from in the middle of summer I don't know! I don't catch colds easily, in fact my partner had a particularly bad one during the winter and I never caught it, but I certainly know about this one.

There, that has cheered you up, reading my depressing post, hasn't it :-)

It hasn't stopped me tangling though. My first tile this week is for Joey's Weekly Monotangle Challenge #74. I am really enjoying these Monotangle challenges as not only do they make me try tangles I might avoid, but also since they are Monotangles you really get to know them. Kosy I have used before and really enjoy drawing. As you can see from my chop on the tile, (thank you everyone for your advice last week) I thought I liked it one way up, so I signed it, then I decided I preferred it on the other side, so here we are:-

In too much of a Hurry with Hurry

H is the letter for the string in Tackle it Tuesday this week. I was looking forward to this, it seemed to me that h would make a great string. I decided on a nicely rounded lower case h, then wanted to put Hurry in the lower central hole. I must have been in too much of a hurry with my Hurry because I started with 3 vertical lines instead of 3 diagonal lines and had gone too far to stop. I liked it in the end, I thought it looked just like a little door into Wonderland. I also used Hep-Mee and the free-form version of Huggins. I left the h as a negative space as I didn't want to lose the shape.

Spreading the Word

This morning I have been to my knitting group. We are not a knit and bitch group, but instead we are a knit and natter group - there is a subtle difference :-) I have been telling them all about Zentangle® and some seemed quite interested. I think one or two will go and look it up and maybe try it themselves.

I also told them about the challenges that I enjoy drawing for. This one I have drawn for Diane and Carolein's Alphabet Challenge. NBV. Have you seen the two tiles that Diane and Carolien have drawn for it, they are fabulous. I hope I get to be so good one day.

I have done my usual format of normal and bijou tiles in my 6" x 9" sketchbook and I have to say I was quite pleased with it too. I used String #155 for the tile part and for the tangle patterns it has N'Zeppel, Bales, Betweed, Blooming Butter, Bault, Nipa and Vortex. For the rest I used two sorts of B'Twined, Narwal, Verigogh and Beadlines. I was the first time I had done shadows and I was quite pleased with the results on the Beadlines, it is wonderful what you can learn by looking at other people's posts. I have also seen some really fantastic finely drawn Verdigogh and whilst mine is not like that yet it is coming along, at least it is starting to look like the step-out.

Joining the ZenDivaDala Dance

Thank you to everyone who joined in the discussion last week about copyrighting and watermarks. Overall, for myself, I have decided not to watermark. I think it is unlikely that mine will be stolen at this stage. If I ever start producing masterpieces then I probably wouldn't put them on my blog, I will get in touch with Christie's or Sotherby's instead :-)

How nice to see Erin on the Diva Challenge, for a moment I thought I had clicked on the wrong blog lol. I have only done a couple of Zendalas before as I find some of the spaces quite restrictive and repetitive. However I gave it a whirl, used Swarm for the centre, Dragonair for the spines and Arcflower for the roundals., and here is the result:-

A Paddle

We have been for our first paddle of the year. The Irish Sea is never warm at the best of times, but if we wait until well into the summer the sea has had time to become a few degrees warmer, as it has ebbed and flowed over the warm summer sand (at least that is what we tell ourselves). The summer this year has been so wet and cold that the sea doesn't seem any warmer. It was just like paddling in a bucket full of ice! We managed to paddle along the shoreline for about 15 mins before we came out and I have to say our feet felt really refreshed from it.

Now we have returned home and I have been busy tangling for SuzieMosh's New To Me Challenge. Tangle Patterns new to me were Afterglow, Abundies, Amoeba, Agua, Antz and Sand Swirl from Karry Heun. Tangles I had used before were Antidots, Ahh and Arc Flower. I really enjoyed drawing it.

To Chop or Not To Chop

I have decided to change the initials I sign my work with. Everybody here, and friends at home, know me as YT so I have decided to use those initials for my work. I have played around with them, both capitals and lower case, but they don't easily make a monogram. I tried them side by side but they don't seem to connect gracefully. (See below) I finally decided on a capital T above but connecting into a lowercase y. (See below) It still looked a little plain, no flourish, so I tried it in a chop. (See below) Now I can't decide which is best, to chop or not to chop, what do you think?

I have used it in a chop this time for Joey's Monotangle Challenge. This week it is Margeret Bremner's Jemz, I am not fond of grid tangle patterns for Monotangles so I have turned it into a circle:-

My week 10 - Sepia

It's my birthday today and one of my gifts is a set of three Derwent Graphik Sepia Line Markers. They come in sizes 0.1, 0.3 & 0.5. so of course my first tile had to be drawn in sepia. SuzyMosh's Tangle Me Three is just right for this. I love Arukas and for the variations I did a square Arukas and a swirly Arukas. I really enjoyed drawing the swirly one but loved the way the square one turned out at the corners. The original Arukas, by the way, is tucked into the centre of the square Arukas.

Alphabet Strings

G made a great string in the  Tackle it Tuesday Challenge, (actually now that I think about it I should have entitled this post G-String, but I didn't want any creepy searches coming up with my post lol).

I used a handwritten g. I love gneiss and thought the top circle of the g would be ideal but once it was finished I thought it looked a bit clumpy. I really enjoyed drawing the whole thing in my sketch book. The tiles are normal and bijou sized drawn on 9" x 6" paper. I have quite a lot of G tangle patterns in there. Gust, Good Joss, Gravee, Gnarly, Gumleaves and of course Gneiss that I mentioned previously.

Photographs

 Modern digital cameras are amazing. Just think, without digital photography this worldwide Zentangle community would probably never have got together. It is marvellous to be able to put so many photographs on our blogs. In the past we would never have a) taken so many photos b) certainly not of drawings that we do every day c) been able to upload them from the camera or phone so simply. The sheer cost of having your film developed prevented that. I know computers were not common back then so it wouldn't have happened anyway, but even if they had been around without digital photography we would never have met each other, made virtual friends and be able to share in small parts of each other's lives.

I had a lot of fun with the BEZ challenge turning it into those falling tiles. The paper was 6" x 9" the tiles are drawn at normal size and bijou size. I used blooming butter, eddies, exis, zinger, zailz, B'twined, Bridgen, and wound Eez around the tiles. The photo is not so good, I had to turn it into a black and white photo. I hope you can see it. (Typical, just when I have been blogging about how good digital cameras are!)

A Sharp Shard

Shard is the tangle pattern for SuzyMosh's Tangle Me Three this week. I had a terrible job trying to think of some variations without introducing something like tipple and how to make it look less hard. In the end I stopped trying to think, I put the original down as a border at the top then decided to do one with the lines blocked. I just started going round in a circle after that, creating one after another in the same position on the previous shard and this is how it turned out. I was rather getting into the rhythm by time I stopped. Lastly I rounded off the top of the shard to put down the side. When I had finished and looked at it I thought "no, I will have to do something else", but I left it overnight and when I got up I still didn't like it, it is too hard and they don't look connected but decided it would have to do as I didn't think I was going to manage anything better looking, After all I suppose the challenge is about variations and not about prettiness. At least it will go to show not everything is automatically wonderful lol.

Star of the Show Again

I have seen several tiles lately with a watermark across them, hoping to combat copyright issues. I am wondering what you all think about this. I do agree that stealing other people's work is a dreadful thing to do, but watermarks are unsightly. I don't think I need to worry, my tiles are not yet of a standard that someone is likely to poach, but I did give a watermark app a try just to see the outcome. To be effective the watermark really needs to be across the centre of the work, and there are some which are quite transparent, but would they really stop someone copying to sell if they wanted to? What is your opinion, to watermark or not to watermark?

For the Diva's Challenge I have once again put myself centre stage. This time I have created a void using my avatar as a silhouette and tangled around it. The tangle pattern 'Footlights' just begged to be used across the bottom, and then after that I used the old favourites, Pokeroot, Mysteria and Bunzo.

Inapod In a Pod.

Sometimes I get a sort of mental block when it comes to thinking about how I want to draw a tangle. Today was not such a day, I immediately knew what I wanted to do with Inapod for Joey's Weekly Monotangle Challenge. So without further ado here is Inapod in a pod, falling out of a pod.

My week 9 - Zzzzzzz.......

You didn't warn me about the adverse effect of tangling ! There I was, happily tangling away, relaxing nicely, and the next thing I know I am face down in my tangle and my pen had shot across the paper making a nasty mark. Yes, I had fallen asleep as I tangled, just like those videos you see of toddlers in their high chair falling asleep face down into their food ! As for that pen mark, I had to start all over again :-(

SuzyMosh's New To Me has certainly been a challenge to me this week. A lot of the Tangles beginning with J are grid type tangles and they are never my first choice. In the end I chose Joy, Jax, Jawz, Jesterz, Jakousie, Jajazz, and Jambalee.

From time to time I have seen the Zentangle® Step Out Forms that the CZT's use and admired them, particularly the side with the tile examples on. I thought I would try and make a ZIA based on this concept. I drew a normal sized tile for the chosen tangle patterns and then three bijou tiles tumbled about and tucked into the paper. I used the bijou tiles to try some tangles out with some variations in before making my final decision for the main tile and then thread Jax around them. The paper was 9" x 6".