Journaling: Recycling!

I am constantly keeping my eyes open for papers, letters, labels and other stuff that I can recycle in my art (collages - mixedmedia paintings). Now as I got the chance to make a prompt in a FB-group I took my chance and made it all about recycling. I haven´t been tangling a lot on other materials so this was also a challenge for myself. My first page went like this:

I used watercolor, stamps and a crossword I tangled on. Since I don´t do crosswords very often I liked to do them this way instead! The tangles on this page are: Cat-Kin (Mimi Lempart), Sistar (Hanny Nura), CaligraV (Mary d´Angelo) nd fragment H5.

The second page:

Recycled material: A label from a coffee-packaging, a part from a golden envelope, a piece of marbeled paper I have kept for years and a piece of a thicker paper that had a beautiful brown color. the label I had to find another pen to tangle with and Sakura Soufflé worked fine.  The golden envelope is tangled with Sakura Identipen and white charcoal. I am not scrapbooking but once I found some borders for sale, very cheap and I thought I might be able to use it someplace....That is in the bottom of the page. It was a little difficult to take a photo of this page, it was quite glossy! The tangles used:Wud (Joni Feddersen), Tripoli, Pokeroot, Mooka, Sez, Tipple and Printemps.

The third page:

If the second page was about coffee, I had to use a label from my favourite wine! Which wasn´t easy to tangle on! Micron´s didn´t work too well. Gellypen were ok. But then I found out that I could use Acrylic-paint-pen and then tangle on the dried surface! I also added a tangled part of a page from a book I won´t read again. Here are a lot of tangles, some I have forgotten the name of but here comes a list of those I know: Mooka, Tipple, Diva Dance,Dewd, Ruutz (Eni Oken), Pop-Cloud (Carla du Prez), Laced (Elisabeth Martin), some Crescentmoon... The page from the book was tangled quite long ago but I didn´t know what to do with it until now.

Oh yes! I had a lot of fun doing this!

Journal and Fullmoon Mosaic

Prompt6. Magic Carpet Ride. To create a magic carpet? This Prompt from Karen Polkinghorne was so fun to do. A magic carpet that flies away above the clouds.... I once again went to my box with abandoned tiles and found one made on white notepaper and one on a paper painted with black gesso. The first one was a low quality paper, you know those who comes in notecubes. As I started as a tangler I just took any paper to work on. The next one was an experiment, I wanted to try the black gesso surface if it could work tangling on. It worked, but it didn´t work the way I liked so I stopped trying this. Now I made some weaving and went on tangling a border around the middle part of the carpet. It needed some color, so the watercolorpencils got to do the work. Still it wasn´t enough magic in this, so I used my Sakura Gold, that I got on the seminar and made the carpet glitter! There it was and I liked it!

I have seen the Fullmoonmosaic (a challenge from Hanny Nura) done a couple of times and I have thought it is a beautiful thing to be a part of. Now I did go for it and if the Magic Carpet Ride was a magical ride, this Fullmoonmosaic sure was magical to do. Hanny Nura gave us 2 strings and one pattern, Irka (Alena Light), to take off from. Here are my tiles:

Patterns: Irka (Alena Light), Peace Petals (Sandy Kelley Jones)
Locar, Poke Leaf and Poke Root.

Patterns: Irka (Alena Light), Icantoo (Hanny Nura), Flux,
Tipple and Fragment Q7

I wanted to have them together too:

Oooh I loved to do this! The fullmoon is shining!

Abandoned tiles in Diva´s challenge.

Art is never unfinished, only abandoned! - Leonardo da Vinci

This quote is what Laura Harms starts her challenge 386. I totally agree. It has been a lot about abandoned art/tiles for a while. In my last blogpost I went through this with my journal. So I couldn´t resist this challenge as it walks hand in hand with the Oopses!!

I first found this one:

I belive I started this one in another challenge for the Diva, but put it away, I thought it looked clumsy and didn´t like the way the colors worked.

An here is the result! After I had worked on it a while I actually put it away and almost gave it up. But then I brought it back and went on telling myself I had to look for what this tile wanted and start playing, not judging! Now I am happy I did. The patterns: C-View (Ria Matheussen), Ipso (Jennifer Hohensteiner), Quabog, Maze, Mini-Tipple, Printemps and a little piece of Shattuck.

For the next one I almost forgot to take the before-pic. I just started with Mooka and then I remembered. So the first pick only would have had Printemps on it!

This one wasn´t abandoned in the way my first one was. I started to do Printemps when I was interrupted for some reason and had to do something else. Then I forgot all about it. Now was the time to finish it!

The patterns added: Crescentmoon, Mooka and Fescu. I didn´t go on with the micron I started it all with, I choose to work with  my fountain-pen that sort of has been abandoned for a while and I loved to take it up again!

A long blog-post about Oops!

Warning! This will be a long blogpost! At the bottom of this post I will give a summary in Swedish dedicated to my students in the Workshop I had in Östhammar recently! Svensk sammanfattning i slutet.

In Zentangle we learn: There are No Mistakes! This was one of the first things I heard about when I started my Zentangle-journey. As things happens that doesn´t go the way we intended to on a tile, there is another word for it: Oops. O: Outstanding, O: Opportunities,P: Presented, S: Suddenly. This describes very well what it is all about. To look upon mistakes as there are no such things as mistakes, but new oportunities to go into another direction. 
Common Oopses:  The pen doesn´t work like expected, the ink comes too fast or doesn´t come at all, the drawn line occasionally doesn´t go the same way as in the step-out for a certain pattern and so on. Or spilling coffe all over the tile, not by purpose but by accident! Or a pet jumping on your hand while drawing a subtle line!

Very early I got a good advice, not to throw tiles away, (but keep them for further consideration) just because they didn´t look like I wanted them to look or because I thought I had ruined them! So I started to keep them in a box named "Z-bargain". I didn´t look into that box until recently when there came a prompt in a Fb-journaling group about Oops.

Digging in this box I found a lot of stuff but my first choice was a black  self-cut zendala, without date,  done long ago and another black tile done recently. Unfortunately I forgot to immediately take a before-pic but this is what the zendala looked like after I had highlighted it a little more and worked on the gem adding some orbs around it.

Patterns: Arukas, Ammon (Sandy Steen Bartholomew) and
´Dillo (Lori Manoogian)

I still didn´t like it so I made a cut with my circlecutter (not a very good one) and fixed the unbalance.

The squared tile I made while preparing for the workshop in Östhammar about Reticula and fragments. It was in a mess and I did mess it up even more using Colorsoftpencils. That´s when I remembered to take a pic:

The Colorsoft pencils was a bad idea. After adding the colors nothing else seemed to work on this surface! I realized that I had to do something totally different and something I usually never do working on my tiles. In my other artwork I often make collages and mixed media and recently I have been working on paper from books to make them translucent so that the words will appear on the collage without too much paper to be seen. I glued such a piece of paper on my tile and then worked on it a little bit more. Here is the final journal page:

This was such a satisfying way to bring tiles alive! I had to dig a little deeper in my box and found this:

Lucky for me this tile was dated! As I found it I knew what this was all about. I was deeply disappointed with the tile at the time I made it. Now I didn´t think it looked too bad but I was still bored looking at it. The reasons why I gave it all up was, I didn´t like the shading at all and to save the tile I used watercolor on it and the green pen obviousely wasn´t dry enough! What to do with this? My first impulse this time was to grab another tile to recue, I wasn´t sure I could make anything with this one. But then I said to myself: There are No Mistakes! And from there I went on working on it. Doing so, I really enjoyed the process and here is my finished tile:

Patterns: EAXY (Nadine Roller), Fassett (Lynn Shelton Mead)
and as a border I used Centipede.

I was happy when I saw the outcome and grateful to this opportunity to give this tile new dimensions! Here is the final journalpage:

Of course I have earned new skills and techniques over time,but this is NOT about that at all. This is about finding out the truth in the message: No Mistakes only New Opportunities. A way to look upon my work from another angle, without condemning, but with curiosity where everything will go and what will happen if I do so or so. A chance to discover new solutions. To embrace the Oopses and be grateful as they appear. This is one of those things that are important in the Zentangle method. When I am able to watch my work in the light of "No misstakes" a magic door opens up and wonderful things might happen! I do love that.

Svensk sammanfattning: I Zentangle lär vi oss att ”Det finns inga misstag!” Det var en av de första sakerna jag fick höra när jag började min Zentangle-resa. När oväntade saker händer, som inte tycks bli det man själv avsett använder vi ett annat ord i Zentangle: Oops. Skulle man översätta det så blir det  istället EMVP: E: Enastående, M: Möjligheter, V: Visar sig  P: Plötsligt.  Att byta synsätt, se på misstag som att de inte alls är misstag utan nya, oväntade möjligheter att gå i en annan riktning.

Vanliga Oopses eller på svenska Emvp: En penna ger ifrån sig för mycket bläck, för litet, eller inget alls, en ritad linje avviker från en step-out,  eller man råkar spilla kaffe över sitt arbete. Eller att något husdjur hoppar mot ens hand när man ritar!

 Tidigt fick jag också ett gott råd: Kasta inte bort en tile bara för att den inte ser ut som jag tänkt mig eller för att jag tyckte att jag förstört den av någon anledning. Så jag spar allting i en låda som jag döpt till Z-fynd. Jag brukar inte titta i den lådan särskilt ofta tills  nyligen när en prompt kom upp i en Journaling-grupp på Fb. Prompten handlar just om Oops.

När jag grävde i lådan hittade jag både det ena och andra och valde till slut ut en svart, odaterad Zendala som jag själv skurit till. Den gjorde jag för länge sedan. Jag valde också en nyligen undanlagd svart tile som jag gjort när jag planerade workshopen i Östhammar. Den blev rörig och jag la undan den och gjorde en ny.  Tyvärr tog jag "före"-bilderna efter att jag kommit en bit på väg i arbetet. Zendalan bearbetade jag först med att förstärka högdagrar och lägga till rundlar runt stenen i mitten. Men det räckte inte, jag fick också skära ner den till en mindre zendala för att få en balans. Den nyare tilen rörde jag först till ännu mer  genom att använda Colorsoft pennor, vilket gjorde att inga andra pennor fungerade på den ytan, så jag fick ta till metoder från mina collage innan den blev sig själv. Ingen zentangle precis men en ZIA! Jag sammanfogade allt sammans till en ny sida i min journal som jag är glad åt!

Nästa räddningsaktion blev så en daterad tile från 2016. När jag återsåg den kände jag igen känslan av besvikelse som medförde att jag la undan den. Orsaker: Jag var totalt missnöjd med skuggningen och försökte uppväga det med att lägga till akvarellfärg, vilket medförde att det gröna bläcket flöt ut. Oops! I efterhand kan jag konstatera att jag hade fallit för frestelsen att planera den här tilen och den blev inte som jag hade tänkt från början. Men nu tyckte jag inte att den var så dålig som då. Efter en viss tvekan fortsatte jag, nu utan att planera! Jag njöt av processen och blev glatt överraskad över resultatet!

Självklart har jag genom åren lärt mig mer och tillägnat mig fler tekniker, men det här handlar inte om det. Det här handlar om att se att det faktiskt inte finns några misstag, bara nya möjligheter. Ett annat sätt att se på arbetet jag gör från en annan vinkel, utan fördömanden och snabba slutsatser. Om att ta till mig Oopsen och vara tacksam när de visar sig, för de ger mig chansen att upptäcka skönhet i det oväntade. För mig har det tagit tid att kunna vila i detta! ”Inga misstag” är en magisk dörr om öppnar sig och underbara saker kan hända! Det gillar jag!

Valentineweek with Divas challenge and Zenuari 2019 Swap

Hearts hearts everywhere. I am not doing a lot of hearts. I have never done, except when I was a teenager. But I can´t avoid them either. I eat them:

I have also drawn some this year. But I didn´t follow the Valentangle 2019, like I did 2018, since I have been busy with other things in life. Painting f.ex. But I have something to post anyhow! Lucky for me there was a Zenuari Swap on the 27th and I asked if Susan Kelley Pundt wanted to do the swap with me and last week I got a happy mail from her!

The before-pics!

I started with the hearty one! Susan had begun with
La Bel (Sue Jacobs) and Funsin (Ru Yu Chen) and I
continued with Hearty  (Livia Chua).

Susan´s start was Ubiko (Cyndi Knapp) and
Zari (Veena Arun) and I finished with
Denma (Anoeska Waardenburg) in combination
with Sez.

There were some hearts from me this Valentine too! I give Susan an extra hug because of this! And an extra hug because her tangling forces me to work with color on the tiles. I do love that, she is pushing me out of my comfort zone!

I am the Diva´s challenge no. 385 also was about Valentine. So I made this as an opportunity to try Dolly Bolen´s new Valentinetangle

"Vintage Heart":

I needed a border so I picked Lo Lo (Hsin-Ya Hsu). Now my hearts will rest for a while!

Journaling - Zentangle

I have thought about journaling for quite a long time. Michele Wynne´s blog Coffee and Creativity has been and is a great inspiration. I love the classic Zentangle, I love to do my tiles in black and white and I love the possibilities when it comes to "beyond basics".I haven´t done a lot of ZIA:s (=Zentangle Inspired Art). But journaling is something that I want to explore more. I decided to post my first steps on the journaling road and I might post some more further on. Here are my first pages:

I have joined a group on Facebook (Our Tangled Lives),which will be a support for me I hope. I have chosen my word for 2019, which was the easy part: Possibilities.

Then I found a quote: "You don´t need to know precisely what is happening or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope" - Thomas Merton

This quote just popped up as I looked for it and it is special to me. A couple of years ago I was reading Thomas Merton and his thoughts made a great impression on me at that time, so this is exactly what I was looking for!

This page is about Schway, which I have avoided as a pattern. But maybe Schway will follow me further along???

I have done a ZIA!!! This was because of a prompt in the Fb-group. I read a story about a tradition in Nepal where they use to make flags with messages, prayers to dead ancestors, friends and so on. It was a wonderful story and that made me do this page. I loved it! I also made me a bookmark for this page:

It is tiny just 8,9x4cm!

My latest page is about imagination: Notice the invisible. I used Embedded Letters, Denma (Anoeska Waardenburg), and Sistar (Hanny Nura).

I don´t know where this will take me. But now I have taken my first steps on the journaling road. I will try to do this once in a while and look for the possibilities.

Two swaps and The Diva´s challenge 382

Every swap (traveling tangles) is a happy moment. And every swap is so different. I have been lucky having two swaps recently. The first one came all the way from China! May May Chui sent me these beautiful starters:

Blue Toodles with some Tipple on a zendala!Whow!

And then a green amazing gem with Flux, Diva Dance, Static and Printemps....

I finished these and was happy to find the right blue among my colorpencils! Here are my finished tiles:

I don´t use much color in my own tangling so this was like having a party!  I added Dorsal (mine), Fassett (Lynn Shelton Mead and Mooka.

Then the green gem... How to match this very expressiv and beautiful gem? I had fun doing this, adding Cubine, Printemps, Bales variation and Crescentmoon variation.

Then the next swap with Daria Heidendael from the Netherlands. We first met at the Designmuseum in Providence before the seminar started! Here are her starters:

I do  love black tiles! And here with beautiful Tripoli!

Next one is one more gem! And now drawn in greyscale! I almost forgot to take the beforepic, you can see the little line I started with on the right side of the gem! But then I stopped and took this pic!

Here are my finishes:

I went on with Diva Dance , Quandary and Indyrella. Yes I tried my goldpen on this one too!

This one was so delicate to start with. I was anxious to ruin the whole thing. But then I started to think about Rick and Maria. I heard their voices in my head about "no worries, just one stroke at the time" and "no mistakes"! We learned the Crescentmoon variation at the seminar and also how to use Florz in a different way, so I just went on with this and the whole tile came alive.  This was a moment of magic!

Diva Challenge no 382. Laura asked for stripes as string. That is fun to do and a chance to use bordertangles... 

My string

Zenith in the middle with Meer, Shattuck, Marasu and Fanclub in the corners. I liked to do this and they are all tangles I know so well, I don´t have to think what to do next. Thank you Laura, even if I don´t do every challenge, I do enjoy every one I do!

Calendarpost 19th-27th of november

Playing with Rixties. We try to make friends!

Started with Arukas, but went on with Sander and more Rixties!

I want to keep going to the end of the year sharing my calendar. But I have other plans for next years, so I might not comment to much. Last three days I started with Diva Dance, Rock-n´-roll. Now Rixties is following me! Happy about that. But what happened on the 26th! Hollibaugh interfered and took the place! On the 27th Hollibaugh vined through Diva Dance who was walzing! Wonder how she liked that!

Calendar 7th-12th of october.

Following inktober -18 in my calendar:

7th-9th:  Onion Drops (Shasta Garcia), Cockles ´n´Mussels (Margaret Bremner) and Fe-Ba (Lisa Chang). It was very nice to revisite patterns I learned very early in my zentangle Journey. I did like these very much then and now they wer like new discoveries!

10th-12th: Sez (Zt), Copada (Margaret Bremner) and Heartswell (Helen Williams). Sez has been and still is a challenge for me. It is easy to learn and I like to see it done by others. Well I guess I have to work on it more to make it flow.

Sometimes I need some blue - IAST 263

Last night when I sat down tangling I decided to try IAST 263. At the start I wasn´t too happy about the choice of string for this challenge. The patterns are great: Kettling (Ria Matheussen), Sails (Helen Williams) and Ahh (Zt). It happens that the string doesn´t talk to me and this was such an occaison. I hesitated, but I wanted to try Ria´s new pattern and Sails I haven´t done for a while, though it is a favourite of mine! I have learned a few things through the zentanglejourney of mine and one thing is: Don´t worry, just relax and go with it!  So here is my first result:

As I wasn´t too happy about it, I went to bed and slept on it. This morning I watched it carefully and decided it needed something more. My watercolorpencils! And my favourite blue, Preussian Blue!

So this is the final one for this challenge! I am glad I went on with it. This was a good exercise for me to train my patience and my confidence in the process. There will always be a way and an outcome that I might not have been expecting! This is one thing I love about the Zentangle method!

Diva´s challenge 369

Only doing this with orbs, circles! This challenge is all about orbs. What is more like orbs than Tipple! Here is my entry:

And what is more orb-like than doing a zenbutton!?! I enjoyed this challenge and I love to do orbs in all kind of ways. Also some Printemps wanted to play. Thank you Laura for one more special challenge! Now I am ready for bed and tomorrow morning I am going to visit my granddaughters!

Celebrating IAST 5 years!

Adele Bruno has made challenges with strings for 5 years! It is amazing and I have been following this , not for 5 years, but I am so impressed that she has been able to do this. So much fun you share with us Adele! So here is my contribution for this event:

The patterns as suggested for this challenge: Knights Bridge, Kitl (Jem Miller), O (Adele Bruno) and Prestwood (Margaret Bremner).