Gemstones

I have been drawing Eni Oken's gemstones. So much fun. Colored pencil mostly. I never realized the potential of colored pencils until now. The ornate bezels add a lot to the stones. Enjoy...

I like this tiny one. My original purpose in doing these was to put them into my Zentangles. So maybe this is the right size for that.

Here is the blue Crazy Gold Auraknot that I promised. Now I have a green one in my mind. Have to go buy the paper.

Tomorrow or the next day I will put up the gemstones I have been drawing. Come back soon.

Golden Ribbons

This was so much fun. Eni Oken has a downloadable pdf course called Crazy Gold Auraknot. I think it costs $12 but am not sure. I can't seem to get back to that screen now that I already bought it . 

She starts with the traditional Auraknot tangle pattern, but then she lets it get freeform and wonky and more fun. The ribbons travel over and under one another in a cool way. For $3 apiece I also purchased a Fine and an Extra Fine PenTouch pen she recommended. They are made by the Zentangler's friend Sakura, and are brighter than the Gellyrolls I had been using for gold, which look fine on white, but can't really hold their own on burgundy colored paper. I bought some colored paper in blue too. Working on that now, hope to show you soon! 

PS I am teaching an Intro to Zentangle class at Sierra College Community Ed on 

Saturday, July 27, from 10am to 1pm. 

Click here to sign up.

Two Upcoming Classes

I am going to teach two Introduction to Zentangle^TM  classes in March. If you have already taken Introduction to Zentangle, come anyway, and I will customize some new things for you so you are not bored with repetition. Please call me if you have any questions at 530-852-2260 or email me at maryhelen@maryhelenfein.com. I hope you can make it.

Sierra College Community Ed, Roseville, Saturday, March 16
The first class is at Sierra College Community Ed in downtown Roseville. It will be held on Saturday, March 16, from 10am to 1pm.  It takes place in a very nice classroom with lots of good tech, overhead projector, Internet, large screen, etc. Cost is $39, plus a $10 materials fee that you pay to me at the class. If you already have the Zentangle kit, just bring your own. You can call Sierra College to register at 916-781-6280, but it's okay to just show up if you need to. You can also register online at their website - just click this link

http://sierracommunityed.org/index.cfm?method=ClassInfo.ClassInformation&int_class_id=65249&int_category_id=0&int_sub_category_id=0&int_catalog_id=0


Dawn's Hallmark Art Supply, Auburn, Saturday, March 2
The second class is at Dawn's Hallmark Art Supply in Auburn. This is a fabulous art supply store, my favorite in the foothills. The class will be on Saturday, March 2, from  10am to noon or maybe a bit later. The class is free, with a $10 materials fee for the Zentangle Kit, and you can bring your own supplies if you have them. Please call me to register, 530-852-2260. You can leave a message if I miss your call. I have two people signed up (a mother and 9-year-old son) and would love to have more, Please come and join us!

Old Friends and 20-Sided Shapes

This morning I decided to revisit an old friend, the Zentangle Diva at www.IAmTheDivaCZT.com. Every Monday morning she posts a challenge for the week. I used to do them all the time, and many times found inspiration in her prompts, so I returned to her website to see what was up. This week she asked for stripes. 

I drew my stripe string first  and started with Betweed, a tangle pattern I  have always loved, but  recently messed it up and realized I had forgotten how to draw it. I practiced with Maria Thomas's instruction video until I felt confident again. Maria says Betweed looks like woven Moroccan leather, but to me it always looks like something a Native American woman might use for a papoose.

Then I did a small area of Shattuck, just because how can you do stripes without Shattuck? For the bottom stripe up I used Zander, one of my favorites, but this time I made it a fun, fat and bulging Zander with a few little jewels on the bands. For even more inspiration I got down the Zentangle Primer and used a little spidery guy in the upper left stripe that somehow turned into a triangle. On page 120 of the Primer are about 100 triangle fragments. This is K12. 

Once I had jumped on the fragment and reticula bus, I remembered how much I liked T5, AKA Sleepy Owl Eyes. So in they went. Only the center remained. I wanted something that would tumble across the stripe and burst out with enthusiam. I went for Flux, which didn't quite burst out, but did have plenty of enthusiam. Done. What fun. While I am tangling, I just feel happy.

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A couple of days ago our CZT group met. There are four of us, and we have met for well over a year by now. I am very fond of the women in this group. This month it was my turn to present a project, and I had met Pat Verhagen at ZenAgain in Providence, R.I., last November and seen her Icosahedrons. These are 20 sided figures. I thought they would make a good project for us. Pat was very helpful and very reasonably priced. You can reach her through her wonderfully named store Cut Up And Sew on Palm Coast in Florida. Her well-designed templates made this whole project simple. 

She sent me around a dozen of these Icosahedron templates. This photo shows our CZT group's partly finished efforts.

And this is my final, double-sided-tape-glued-together icosahedron. I enjoyed this very much.

ZenAgain 2018

In late November, I attended a seminar for Certified Zentangle Teachers in Providence, R.I. Present at this event were about 200 of the 4,000 CZT's, from all over the world, each of whom is certified by Zentangle's founders Rick Roberts and Maria Thomas. We have all taken the CZT training and are now allowed to teach. Most of us are devoted to Rick and Maria for a number of reasons. For me, first and foremost it is gratitude for creating the Zentangle form and making it available to us. After that, it is because they are warm and friendly and smart and fun. And amazingly creative. They keep coming up with fascinating ideas for things to try. This seminar, called ZenAgain, was no exception.

We started out at our first session with kind of a warm up, doing a simple little variation on Crescent Moon, a tangle pattern always included in everybody's "Tile Number One." This is because it illustrates the important Zentangle concept of Aura. When you aura, you outline a shape that is already on the paper, such as the black half moon shapes you see below. And then the auras can be aura'd. I have heard it said, "When in doubt, Aura!"  This is a Bijou tile, very small, maybe 2 inches square.

One of the themes of ZenAgain was deconstructing works by well-known artists who use patterns.We covered three artists, Gustav Klimt, Keith Haring, Ernst Haeckel, this last artist being new to me. In this blog post I will tell you just a little about each, and show a Zentangle I created, inspired by and giving homage to each.

Gustav Klimt

Klimt painted mostly women, and his work is decorated with patterns. Here is his Woman in Gold.

You may have seen the film about this painting, starring Helen Mirren. The canvas had been placed in a gallery by the Austrian state, and was so beloved that it was known as the Austrian Mona Lisa. The only problem was that the Nazi's had stolen it from the subject's Jewish family, and the rightful heir to the family brought suit to get it back. After some courtroom battles, the Austrian courts did the right thing.They gave the painting back to her. We had fun at ZenAgain finding well-known tangles in Klimt, such as printemps, and making up other tangles after his patterns. Here's a Zentangle based on Klimt.I wish you could see teh beautiful metallic gold.

Keith Haring

The second artist we looked at was Keith Haring. He was a gay New York Steet artist,  during 1980's time of AIDS, from which he died. Here's a sample.

He used signs and symbols in a language all his own. Here's one I did, based on his earlier work where he was practically making his own alphabet out of shapes and well=known symbols like arrows and hearts and orbits. 

Ernst Haeckel

The thrid artist we looked at was Ernst Haeckel. I had never heard of him. Not surprising because he was a biologist, not in any art history courses. I highly recommend the book of his prints, Art Forms in Nature. I simply could not believe that the creatures he drew were real. But they are. I had a similar experience at the Museum of Natural History in New York when I visited the fish room. You might think, ah fish. But think again. There were thousands upon thousands of fish, all stuffed, all pinned to the walls behind glass in a gymnasium-sized room with a 2nd story balcony to double the number of exhibits. I swear that I saw this: a shiny coal black fish who had, sticking out of the top of his square-ish coal black head, mounted on a kind of stem, a second shiny black fish head just like his own. And the second story fish head had a yet a third fish head just like the others sticking out of his head. A fish with a three story head. A true story. New respect for nature's diversity and magic that I still feel now, 30 years later. Haeckel's book is incredible. Here's my Haeckel-inspired jellyfish. Once again the Zentangle team led us through magic worlds.

Zentangle, Beyond the Basics

I was very happy to attend a Zentangle seminar at 1440 Multiversity this month. If you are not familiar with 1440, I recommend  you check them out at 1440.org. It's in Scott's Valley near Santa Cruz, and it's a learning center with many inspiring courses and teachers. Apparently Silicon Valley billionaire Scott Kriens and his wife Joanie purchased the old, shuttered, 75 acre Bethany Christian College campus and built a center that is a real pleasure to visit. They constructed beautiful buildings for residences and for classrooms. They invited meditation teachers such as Jack Kornfield, art innovators like Zentangle founders Rick Roberts and Maria Thomas, and many other interesting leaders of our time. It's a real pleasure to be there.

Rick and Maria are a delight. Unassuming and full of interesting ideas. The theme was CONTRAST. We did a number of Zentangles that used light and dark creatively. Here are some of mine with a few comments for each. I hope you enjoy them.

This was my favorite. I love Diva Dance Rock 'N Roll on the left, looking for all the world like a rose. The Knightsbridge with its stripes is so dramatic, and it shows the power of the contrasting black and white. Pokeleaf in the middle provides an unexpected contrast between geometric and organic patterns.

My very own Egyptian columns. We used white pencils for highlight and dark shading in between the columns. This is a Renaissance (pale brown) Zendala tile, which is what we used for the rest of the program. Rick showed some slides of DaVinci and Raphael drawings on this light brown colored paper to explain why they named them Renaissance tiles. 

My second favorite. The big overall tangle patttern is WayBop, always fun. It's decorated in the middle cross with some orbs (fancy word for little circles or ovals). The light on dark orbs again show the power of contrast. Pokeroot berries give a dramatic contrast against the black background.  Maria encouraged us to draw some runaway pokeroot berries creeping into the WayBop. She is very whimsical, and that's a good antidote to being to exacting when tangling.

The rest of the time was spent on what Rick and Maria christened "dingsplats." These are named for dingbats. In typography, a dingbat is an ornament or a graphical spacer used between chapters or for other decoration. It was timely for me to hear more about dingbats, because our CZT group had just last month spent a happy morning together learning about them and drawing them. Here are my two Dingbats that I did with the CZT group,so you get the idea. This floral tangle patttern is called Kiss. With some Fescu tendrils creeping out of the rectangle. These dingbats were drawn by me, but designed by CZT group menber Cheryl Wilson.

This one would look good at the start of a chapter.  In late-breaking, non-Zentangle  news,  I am completely thrilled that my new book has been accepted by a publisher. I mention this because I am thinking of having dingbats between the chapters. We shall see. It might  work. I also mention this because it is one of the great things to happen to me in life so far!

This second dingbat uses tangle pattern Mac Rah Mee. I love the woven center that all the tendrils emerge from. This is a dingbat you would put in the corner of a page Again, both these designs are credited to Cheryl. You can see how creative she is!

Rick and Maria named these last three Zentangles dingSplats. This one uses Knightsbridge.  Knightsbridge is a great tangle pattern for experiencing the power of Contrast. You can see how the black and white make a strong statement. I got the idea for why they chose the name dingSplats when Rick said that this one looked like an entire bottle of Knightsbridge had spilled all over the floor. Splat!

Here is Dingsplat #2. Again a lot of contrast created with black and also using a white pencil again. Lotsa orbs. The Zentangle team was orb-smitten at this seminar, to good effect. The center tangle pattern is called SpokeN. As in spokes.

Here is the last Dingsplat. It was fun to revisit the amazing tangle pattern 'NZeppel. It was pointed out that 'NZeppel looks like you are squeezing round balloons into rectangular boxes. I loved that. Both Molly and Martha,daughters of Zentangle founder Maria Thomas, did a lot of demonstrating at our seminar. They are both very talented and articulate, and they both maintain the high level of quality set by Rick and Maria in their demos. Here we have more orbs and "lacy loops," which is what they called the little pulled threads around the outside border.

Once again, just like at my CZT training in 2016, this 1440 Multiversity seminar was just a delight for me. I spent hour after hour in the zone,my favorite place. This fall I am splurging on Zentangle seminars. I'll be at Zenagain, a seminar for CZT's in Providence. It starts in just a few weeks. I will post again when I get back, mid November. Thanks for following all this! I hope it is interesting to you.