a tangler's throwback thursday (and a hint of cybersnow in Texas).

Chilly autumnish greetings, friends! Those who are familiar with my tanglebucket facebook page have already seen this art, but please read the paragraph at the end!!

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I haven't done any Diva challenges lately (or anything else overly productive, really), but I did just clean out the tin I keep in my bag. When I finish a tangle, it gets shuffled to the bottom of the pile, so I always have a new blank one waiting for me when I open the tin. These are the tiles that have been lurking in the linty darkness of my bag like little vampires... extremely flat, square, white, toothless little vampires. 

Well, Zentangle tiles do have a little bit of tooth. 

*ducks flying tomatoes*

That was terrible...I'm sorry. Although you should have known it was coming, because my lines were center-justified and short, and that's my standard format for doling out nerdy humor. 

Here's some art.

Indy-Rella, in the round. 

Merryweather, with some other fluff thrown in. 

A tangle I started by tracing a round container my mom had sitting on her kitchen table.

A tangle drawn with all straight lines.

Y-knot, accented with phicops, pokeroot, and pokeleaf... 

a Derwent Inktense pencil... a medium Niji waterbrush.

 I honestly have no idea what to call this one. 

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Sooo, if you've read this far down, thank you for sticking with me. For the better part of a year, I have had a draft of a blog post called 'Tangleflakes: The Marshmallow World Challenge' in my blog folder. I was just wondering, friends, if you would consider contributing to that blog post...? Draw your favorite tangles in the round and email them to me, so I can post a flurry of tangleflakes the week leading up to Christmas. Please include your name and the name of the tangle patterns you turned into snowflakes. They don't have to be big and fancy. I was really only thinking of one or maybe two tangle patterns per flake. There are no prizes except the knowledge that you have enabled me to FINALLY get that blog post done... plus the insurmountable joy of seeing your art plastered all over Pinterest. ;o)

How 'bout it?

Who's with me??

Please send your tangleflakes to me at 

tanglebucket
at
gmail
dot
com...
please
and
thank
you.

:oD

If you want to see an example of what I mean by 'in the round', you can go here to see the 'tangleflake' I drew (the last photo on the page) that inspired this whole project.

Let it snow!

Adventures in Monotangles #4: Indy-rella

Roy's Monotangle prompt of the week: Indy-rella.

I don't use this one much, but it has a lot of potential:
• the clusters of ((((s can take any shape.
• good for focus- requires very deliberate pen strokes or it looks messy.
• generous shading keeps it from looking flat.
And like a lot of tangle patterns, a simple wash of color can give it a little oomph without being overwhelming.

I don't really know why I just wrote that as a bulleted list. I'm so tired right now.

oh, and happy Easter!

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)

The collision of past and present at 350°F

Ever since I took my very first Zentangle class back in February, I've wanted to try combining my new favorite concept with the subject of my former life: cookies. Linda (my former boss/fellow CZT) did the baking and made the frosting (God love her, she knows I hate to be in the kitchen unless I'm there to stick my nose in the fridge).

Last week, we sat down at her kitchen table to try tangling sugar cookies. The frosting was a little runnier than we had hoped, so we had to simplify some of the patterns... but other than that, the project was a success. It was really cool to pick up the same familiar decorating bag I used for years and be able to do something completely new with it.

w2

antidots (enhanced with dots... oh, the irony.)

betweed

corner box

indy-rella

veezley

a true tangle: footlites, cadent, and sanibelle (which I use on everything).

two beauties by Linda, whose names I can't recall.

Purk, also decorated by Linda. 

 ...and here we have a visual recap of the last twenty seconds of your life. ;o)

Happy weekend, everybody!

INDY-RELLA, and all who love her.

Meet indy-rella. I like it because you can vary the shapes quite a bit and get different effects, and you can make it look darker or lighter by tightening up or loosening the strokes in the pattern, so it's pretty versatile when you're thinking about contrast within your tangle. Looks amazing when shaded... not hard to draw behind other things... aaand, it won't steal your wallet or tease the dog. WIN.