Wednesday, October 10, 2018

#Inktober Tangle Practice

I thought I'd give you a little insight into my process when I make a Zentangle drawing and what goes on in my head when I do one of these drawing-a-day challenges. For instance, I often am thinking what I want to draw the next day as I am finishing up the drawing of the current day. And so, as I filled the last of the 6 squares on the first sketchbook page of my #Inktober drawing challenge, I had an inkling that the next page would bring a different approach. There were several tangles I wanted to try out, but not within a formal Zentangle 3-1/2 inch tile. So I turned the page, let go of boundaries and approached my drawing on October 7, 8 and 9 as an opportunity to practice. If I liked how a tangle went, I'd incorporate it into a tile later.

As you can see from the photo (click on it for a larger view), these tangles do not come out of my head. I have that small little notebook where I've drawn in "official" tangles and their shadings and variations. The more complicated ones have "step-outs" - a guide to the sequence of lines to more easily produce a tangle. If you play a keyboard instrument, you could relate these to fingering notations. Yes, you could play that tune using your own fingerings but the suggested ones usually make it much easier. Same idea with continuous line quilting designs. So it is with the tangle step-outs.

The ones in my little notebook are from the book that taught me Zentangling (see this post). I've added a few more that have come in the Zentangle newsletter and on their blog. Some of these newer ones have more complicated step-outs and came with beautiful examples of how to use them so those have gotten printed out. That is what I was working from as I practiced on this page. 

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