Tangle Remix, Vol. I + PUFFLE

I work best when I'm (properly caffeinated and) avoiding something else I should be doing. Yesterday, this room was a disaster. Major upheaval going on in here. I've got at least a couple of hours of work left to do in it, so naturally, I'm diving into something I would rather be doing, and avoiding the mess altogether. There's just something about procrastination that gets my creativity crankin'. 

This is a really rewarding artistic exercise for me, taking tangle patterns I already know and kneading/squishing them into something new. The mission: pick two patterns, adopt at least one element from each, and make a new pattern out of the pieces. Like a lot of things I post on my blog, these tangle patterns were more of an exercise in creativity than relaxation. As far as true Zentangle patterns go, these variations are probably not repetitive enough to get fully submerged in the zen. I dunno... maybe I could still lose myself in them for a while. Or if all else fails, I'm pretty sure I could just lose myself in this room. God knows I haven't seen my desk in weeks. 

Pardon the randomness of the pattern layouts; this post has been in the making for a looong time. 

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Tangle remix no. 1:

Eylet & Ribbon (Lori Howe) & 

Crescent Moon (Zentangle)

Tangle remix no. 2:

Assunta (Zentangle) &

Paizel (Angie Vangalis, CZT)

Tangle remix no. 3:

Huggins (Zentangle) &

Hypnotic (Elena Hadzijaneva)

Tangle remix no. 4:

Afterglo (Carole Ohl, CZT) & 

Cadent (Zentangle)

Tangle remix no. 5:

Assunta (Zentangle) & 

Paradox (Zentangle)

Tangle remix no. 6:

W2 (Zentangle) & 

Dansk (Margaret Bremner)

Author's note: As much as I love the above remix, it's not technically correct. 

You can go here to see what Dansk is *supposed* to look like. 

Tangle remix no. 7:

Fleuri (Genevieve Crabe) & 

Veezley (mine)

Tangle remix no. 8: 

Indy-Rella (Zentangle) &

Joy (Joyce Block, CZT)

Tangle remix no. 9:

Sanibelle (Tricia Faraone) & 

Mumsy (Sandy Steen Bartholomew)

And last but not least...Tangle remix no. 10, my FAVE: 

The basic shape/flow of Prestwood, aura'ed to the nth degree like Cruffle. I love this pattern because it's curvy and flowy, and has natural shading even before the pencil comes along. All of those converging lines naturally darken the parts that would be shaded anyway. Wiiin.

The official how-to:

Some tips for a perfect Puffle:

• Begin and end every inner aura at the same point within each section, down in the 'valley' where all the lines converge.

• Sometimes closing the shapes all the way makes that first outline skew a little bit too far in one direction or another. A couple of 'lobes' can always be added to the next section to compensate, as you can see in the examples above.

• When you draw that first continuous outline, close the loops as much as possible. The more open that space is, the harder it is to add in the auras so they look right:

• As with Cruffle, the step that most determines whether your pattern will look right is the FIRST loop inside the initial outline (shown below in pink). If there is an evenly-spaced gap between the first outline and that first loop all the way around the curve, the rest of the pattern will look fine. Getting that first aura right is like using auto-tune for this tangle (only with less cheating!). Notice that the middles (the last stroke) are not even or perfect, but it doesn't matter because that gap in between the initial outline and the first aura within it are evenly spaced.

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Here are my responses to the challenges you left me in the comments:

Virginia's was a tough one...

...so I faked it. :oD

And here we have Mooka on a stick.

This is me reporting live from my couch... sorry this isn't scanned in like it should be. Been sick the last few days, and my camera phone was just so much closer than my scanner. 

(I'm on antibiotics, and they make me lazy.)

Thanks for posting these challenges for me... they were really fun!

Here's an updated version of Purk vs. Squid WITH pencil guides... Purk looks infinitely better when you're working within a shape and not just drawing it freeform (like the one above).

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come visit me here!

Weekly Challenge #70: "Color me Sepia"

Weekly challenge time :o) 

I know Laura's busier than ten men, but I often do the challenge in the first couple of days and then spend the rest of the week wishing I still had one to do. She varies them quite a bit from week to week; sometimes with a certain color, sometimes with a specific string or pattern. I think I might go back through the archives and start trying some of the older ones while I wait for Monday morning to drag slooooowly around. Ha... can't say I know too many people who say it takes too long to get to Monday.

This week, the challenge was to use sepia (or brown). Not a huge fan of brown and black together, so I used brown and this beautiful nameless bluish color. Well, not completely nameless... in Micronland they call him XSDK05#36. *rolls eyes* Come on, Sakura. A little help here... if we can't have names, can we have more distinguishable colors on the caps? I always have to spot test the blues to make sure I have the right one. Maybe it's just me.

However, they do more than make up for this perfectly pigmented injustice with a product called the clear stardust gelly roll pen. It's 0% colored ink and 100% sparkle, and no photo or scan even comes close to doing it justice. Seriously, if you've never tried it, you don't know what you're missing (FYI It says 'clear star' on the barrel, product number XPGB#700). Gelly rolls run out of ink really fast, so once you're hooked you'll want to have two. For each hand.

Or one in every room, like I do with carmex. 

Featherfall, purk, footlites, afterglo, indy-rella, and keeko. And stardust. ;o)

weekly Challenge #64: String Theory v. VIII 'Fortuneteller'

The Diva hath thrown down the gauntlet... and here is my first-ever submission to her Weekly Challenge! <insert angels singing here>

The challenge: To use a predetermined string (that's tanglespeak for 'those little pencil lines that separate the different patterns') and find a way to add in/blend together random patterns in such a way that the final result does not suck.

If you would like to read more information on the Diva's weekly challenges, roll on over to that little button in my sidebar and you'll see one that looks appropriate. I'm not going to tell you which button it is. Think of it as a little sidebar-button scavenger hunt. Now, go! Go forth and discover!