Belated New Year's Greetings

Day 1 and 2

I hope you all had as lovely and peaceful and stress-free of a time between Christmas and New Year's Day as I did. I'd saved videos from Zentangle's latest project Twelve Days Of Christmas that were posted leading up to Christmas day but actually the twelve days of Christmas start on Christmas day. Knowing this and also knowing I didn't have time to fit zentangling into my pre-Christmas schedule, I looked forward to doing a tangle a day during the last days of the year and into the new one.

Day 3 and 4

Rather than work on individual tiles, I worked these in my "and then add red" sketchbook which accounts for the splashes of red in these tangles originally presented in blacks and greys. Some I liked the results of better than others but oh do I love what that red does. Don't forget that you can click on any image for a larger version to view details.

Day  5 and 6

The Zentangle people had settled on a theme for this group of tangles, that being "drawing behind". It's a simple basic zentangle technique that makes your work look much more complicated than it actually is, as does the final step of shading with graphite pencil.

Day 7 and 8

This page has one I wasn't very pleased with and one I rather liked. On the top one, the original curved lines to make the swirl were done with a wet paintbrush loaded with pigment off a watercolor pencil (or in my case, Inktense pencil). Shaky hands and a too small paint brush hindered my swooping of arcs which should have been a tad farther apart to fill up more of the square and make room for inner tangling. The bottom one if full of what we quilters call feathers but in this case, all jumbled up like after a pillow fight. White and red berries nestle here and there.

Day 9 and 10

These two were fairly fun to do. Rick drew the diagonal tangle going over and under itself while Maria added the drops that Rick pointed out looked like Japanese Lanterns, and so they do. As for the bottom one, who does not like a good swirl which in this case comes off looking a bit like clefs. I wasn't crazy about what was added to the space between the outer auras, would definitely do something different if I drew this again.

Day 11 and 12

I was pretty pleased that I stuck to my plan to block out time to do twelve consecutive days of tangling, but I won't lie. By day eleven I was ready to be done, and that top tangle didn't help my attitude any. They did it on a rectangular tile while I had pre-drawn squares on my pages. It would look better if the tassel part was longer but in truth, I didn't like this one much, especially the tassel part. I'd been having trouble drawing lines over this paper which is not very smooth and my unsteady hand coupled with working in the sketchbook didn't help. drawing long curving lines so close together and over and under each other was not the meditative process it could have been. I probably should have found a different tangle to draw, but so close to the end, I just sucked it up and worked it. But the one below was pretty fun. I actually didn't like day one's zentangle at all. It is pretty rare that I'm not willing to even give one a try (see previous description of tangling the top one). Instead, I knew I'd been saving a somewhat Christmas-y tangle for over a year, never adding it to this sketchbook until now, on this last day. Looks a bit like a stocking hat, does it not?

I'm glad I did this as I do enjoy tangling and have been away from it for a long time. What are vacation holidays for anyway? What special thing did you do over the holidays to relax you or kick off the new year?