Weekly Challenge #312 - Spilled Coffee

This week's challenge was to allow a spilled drink to define the string for a Zentangle. Can't get more Zen than that! My coffee with cream and sugar made a lovely beige color. and it very cooperatively divided the tile into 4 sections.

First I filled the beige section with my latest fav tangle: Frumkey. I was too busy to enter the Frumkey challenge 2 weeks ago, so I am making up for lost time. Frumkey reminds me of Joki and 'Dillo, two other favorites of mine. All three seem to have lots of curvy fun chaos. I am new to using a sienna 01 pen. Seems VERY exciting to me to start to add color after 8 months of tangling in black and white only. But I have always been easily amused!

For my second tangle, I remembered Maria saying she liked to combine curves with grids, or maybe she said curvy tangles with more rectangular tangles. Anyway, I thought a grid would provide contrast, so I put in an area of Yew Dee.

The coffee spill created a very nice sized triangle at what was becoming the "top." That gave me the idea of using Foldz, a tangle that seems to lend itself to triangles. I didn't like how it looked, but then once it was shaded it was much improved. Shading Foldz makes a big difference. Shading everything makes a big difference!

Finally I wanted something to tie it all together. Betweed seemed just the thing. I think Betweed is an amazingly mysterious tangle, up there with Paradox. There is so little to drawing it, but so much when you look at it. Between continues to Bewitch!

Thanks to Laura Harms for putting up the challenge each week.

Weekly Challenge #311 - Circles and Squares

This week's Challenge was to use a circle and a square. A few days ago I took an Introduction to Zentangle class with Cheryl Wilson, CZT. Cheryl is a wonderful teacher! We were working with these tangles, so I decided to use them again in the challenge. Flux, Floo and Florz are flamboyant, flabbergasting little flaunters! And Bales and Keeko are old favorites.

I like how Flux works with a black background, never tried that before. I had forgotten how much I liked Keeko, especially when Cheryl showed us how to "shade across the lines," i.e. shade horizontally on the vertical lines and vertically on the horizontal ones. That just looks so good to me. I am continually amazed at the power of shading to make things so much more interesting and dramatic. Not to mention shading's power to cover a multitude of sins, of which I am plentifully guilty!