Inktobertangles 2019

We are soon entering October and Inktober Tangles Challenge 2019. I have done this earlier on Bijou-tiles and in my Calendar. Stephanie Jennifer CZT has published a list of tangles to do each day of October. Here is the list:

You can find more details in the blog 7 Forests 5 Rivers.

This year I want to try the Inktober Tangles on an Opus Tile. I have only made two Opus tiles before this and now I am stepping out of my comfort zone! As I decided to do this I wasn´t sure of how to. Should I divide the surface into 31 pieces? Should I make a string? After I had thought about it I decided not to divide the tile into 31 spaces to fill. It is risky, maybe there wont be room enough for 31 tangles??? Especially as I wanted to start like this:

I was really pleased with this beginning: Inktober 2019 as embedded letters. I will use my favourite fountain pens, one filled with sepia colored ink and one with black ink. As I am going to be travelling for two weeks in October I needed to start with the Inktobertangles earlier. I will not make blogposts every day with my inktober tangles, but hopefully my blog will be updated more often than I have done the last months! Here are the first three tangles of Inktober:

Printemps, Tunnelvision (Jody Genovese) and Toodles. I am excited to do this! I love that I don´t know where this will end if everything will take place on this Opus or....This is also something that feeds  my creativity, the uncertainty of art in progress. I have thought about that if I don´t have room enough I could continue on the back of this Opus.... Working with fountain pens is nice. The ink is flowing easy, no need of pressure to make it work! Why don´t I do this more frequently???

Kintsugi in Journal and applied on September 11th

Kintsugi is a Japanese technique how to mend broken pottery and make the mending visible. The history is in focus, how things happened. The purpose of the mending is to make the broken piece become even more valuable then before. In Zentangle there are no mistakes and this can very well go hand in hand with the Kintsugi philosophy. Unexpected things happens, these are opportunities to walk a little bit further, finding new meanings, new possible solutions that might bring even more beauty to the art. I loved this prompt created by Janet Burdit and I belive this will affect my other artwork as well. In my journal I first used one zendala that I wasn´t happy about, I teared it to three pieces, glued it on a leftover-paper from my monoprinting sessions, and mended it with gold acrylic paint. I also made some tranzending on a part I liked, the Ocsidot by Sandy Kelley-Jones. The second one was a smaller tangled wonky orb which needed something more, so I worked on it the same way. I love how this spread came out!

This week´s Hump Day Challenge was in remembrance of September 11th and I knew what I wanted to do! Not exactly how though! But I started with a black tile and went on from that:

I used Windfarm (Margaret Bremner), Therefore and Tipple. Then I tore the tile to pieces, glued them on a white Apprentice tile, "mended" it with the same gold acrylic paint and then went on with Wud (Joni Feddersen). As I made this I was back on that bus in the afternoon (yes, in Sweden it was afternoon)where I heard the news about the terrorist attack. The bus was crowded and the driver had turned the radio on. Then there came these breaking news about what happened with the Twin Towers. All of a sudden everyone on that bus was silent listening to these hard-to-belive news. I know exactly where the bus was in that moment. 

To practice the Zentangle method is to practice gratitude. This was a very present feeling as I did this. Life isn´t about finding pieces of a puzzle, but it´s about creating and putting those exceptional pieces together.....