Diva #255 - Ghosts of Tangles Past

I love, love, love this week's Diva challenge. The Diva has challenged us to revisit early tiles and then create a new one with same Tangles, same string, same design but a more experienced person holding the pen.

I have not looked at my early work for a long time. It was a pleasant trip down memory lane. 

My Zentangle Journey started on 18th October 2014 with the arrival of my first Zentangle book - the book Pattern Play by Cris Letourneau and Sonya Yencer . I wrote about this book not long after I started this blog.

My first months of Tangling were in a visual diary. It wasn't until a few months later that I started using offical Zentangle tiles. Before I spent more money on this art form I felt that I needed to wait until I was more confident that this was not going to be yet another passing interest  (I have collected quite a few of those over the years - hello scrapbooking and hello Djembe drumming).

I remember opening that first Zentangle book and being gobsmacked by the images. I wanted to be able to create designs just like those in the book.

Here's my first ever tile, dutifully dated, titled and admired. Then there's the tile I created this evening.

What a difference a year (and a bit) makes. My enjoyment of this art form increases all the time.

An unexpected addition to my enjoyment of this art form comes from blogging about it. Blogging taps into my life long love of writing, my new found ability to draw and my new found connection to an online community.

Thank you Amazon.com for recommending the Pattern Play book when I purchased other drawing books.

ZIA jigsaw strings

I've been spending lots of time creating more ZIAs with jigsaw pieces. Below is just one. The shoe lace idea comes from a tile in Beckah Krahula's 500 Tangled Artworks.

Watch this space for progress pictures of my new A3 jigsaw ZIA. 

Happy Tangling

Miss L

A bit more information

Thanks so, so much for the positive feedback that I've been getting about my jigsaw ZIAs. Your feedback encourages me to keep experimenting and pushing my boundaries. 

I visit the blogs of the people who comment and I feel flattered that these people who draw so well think that my work is interesting. 

A couple of people have asked me about my jigsaw ZIAs and how I draw the jigsaw pieces.

I have copied several jigsaw templates from the web into a word document. I play around with the number of pieces and the overall size. I then lighten the image so that it is really faint. Then I print it onto good quality paper, usually an artist's acrylic with 300gsm. 

The faint lines allow me to choose when to darken the pieces or leave them indistinct.

For the ZIA above, I made the lines especially faint. You can see them - just - in the white space. The 3 pieces for the corner I printed onto normal A4 paper, cut them out and traced them where I wanted to place them.

I found plenty of jigsaw templates online. My preference has been to use fairly simple pieces as the point is the Tangle not the complexity of the jigsaw elements.

I hope this helps. Send me a link to your jigsaw ZIA and I'll work out a way to incorporate the links into my blog. Maybe I'll set up a jigsaw ZIA gallery with links to your work and new examples of mine? The possibilities are endless. 

Cheers

Miss L