then and now, now and then

I'm always a little saddened when I hear that a Zentangle tile has 'gone wrong' for someone.  That they've made a mistake, lost their way,  or simply changed their mind about what they wanted it to be.  Part of the pleasure for me is working through those stumbles and reconciling yourself with wherever you and your tile end up.  Sometimes those 'wrong' tiles even end up torn into bits and buried in the bin.  Which is even sadder! 

It's not to say I'm immune to those difficult tile days.  But one thing I never do is throw away a wayward tile.  I'm naturally frugal for a start!  What I do is tuck them in a little basket... for later.  And thus my Leftovers Project was born! 

This week, torn between too many choices and not enough time I decided to revisit old tiles instead of starting new ones. 

First up this green tile that's been lurking on my pile for a good few years.  I found it with the line work half done, on some rather hard to handle tinted watercolour paper that I rarely use now.  The tangles were also ones I haven't used in a long time.  One of the most interesting things in revisiting these old tiles is spotting the changes in my tangling, my skill, style and choices.

Tangled with - Beadlines / Fleuri / Tipz / Pia / Stonestory

 To finish it off I completed the outstanding tangles.  Then anchored the bands to the edges using more tangles.  I added a touch of green coloured pencil and shaded.  Who knows why I didn't like it then, but I do now.

Next up this autumnal looking arc.  I presume I tangled this while trying to get to grips with Peaknuckle.  Drawn over a band of watercolour, again it was abandoned at the line work stage.

Just Peanuckle, plus a few curls and aura

I added shading and highlighting with coloured pencil and graphite.  It looks a lot happier to be finished, but it's lacking in contrast a bit.  Sometimes a tile is set on a path by my past self and it's hard to change that direction. 

And lastly there wast this.  A strange looking tile, left at the line work stage, with only one corner blacked in.  I blacked in two more corners and then grew tired of the effort!  Which is perhaps why I abandoned the tile in the first place...

Tangled with mutant Purk and Lollywimple filled with Jetties and Cruffle

Rounding the remaining sections seemed a decent halfway measure to fully filling them in.  I shaded and added tiny pops of the two colours I still had out from my other two tiles.  Sometimes a little touch like that can really finish off a tile, and also pull three disparate pieces together into something close to cohesion.

There were also a couple of others I worked on, which still remain stubbornly unattractive and I can't see a way to redeem them at the moment.  They have been returned to the basket, perhaps their day will come, even if it's not today!  So, next time you go to throw away a tile, think again... who knows what it's one day destined to become!

going full circle

Sometimes it takes me a while to decide my approach to a weekly challenge, and sometimes things just fall into place almost effortlessly. I noted that this weeks challenge from the Diva was numbered 360 – perhaps she missed a trick in not making it a challenge based on circles, but I didn't! I also knew I wanted to link my pieces for the Diva and Joey challenges, as I was pleased with the result when I did that before.

I decided to work on two tiles from my Leftovers pile  - in this case tiles previously created for a challenge that involved tangling over marks made by spilling a drink, in my case tea.  I'm slowly but surely working through the stash of tiles in my little basket, the tiles I start and then lose my way with. Some of these have been completed and have appeared in posts on this blog. There's quite a few still waiting for my attention, and a handful have traveled to other tanglers to see if they can take the tile somewhere new.

A rogues' gallery - including the tiles I used today

For my Diva tile I used a small circle of watercolour paper which had been dip dyed resulting in bands of deepening colour. I vaguely followed those bands, drawing my Shattuck with rounded ends and occasional appearances of Tripoli. Some bands of light and dark aura along with some simple shading pulled the finish tile together.

Uneven spacing improved by added aura

I needed a bit more room when it came to the tile I want to make in response to Joey's recent challenge. I decided to combine the tangled starters from her last three weeks into one – so I needed space to allow three tangles room to dance.  From my stash I chose a larger paper circle splattered with dropped tea and patterned with teabag prints - I started to draw, allowing the tangles to claim the space as they would.

Featuring - Breach, Mak-Rah-Mee and Relly Telly One 

Once I'd added all my tangling I realised perhaps I didn't need quite as much space as I first thought, as my tangles seem to sit some way apart from one another with no real connection or energy. I toyed with additional tangling or shading but then I had an idea - stippling. I haven't used it in a long time but I thought it might just work. And it did, but it took a very long time to do, and more than once I cursed the fact that I'd even started!  But it's good to remember it as a technique, and I may revisit it in smaller doses.  Linda Farmer has written a helpful article about it on her wonderful website.

I like the finished piece, the areas of colour versus those without, the tangles and the spaces between them. And I can't help but smile when I look at all those hundreds of tiny dots and think about all those tea leaves in the bag that originally coloured this tile.

through the looking glass

It's been a long time since I've taken part in one of Joey's weekly challenges.  It's been a long time since I've used Andromeda.  It's been a long time since I grabbed a tile from my Leftovers pile and breathed life into it.

From what I recall I made this background tile years ago, probably when I was first trying out the Gelly Roll Glaze pen.  I've haven't been near it since.  It doesn't particularly speak to me, but I thought it might be fun to try to send that band of Andromeda that Joey invites us to start with, in opposition to the Glaze band on the tile.

That was my starting point, and from there the tile developed with little planning and lots of instinct.  And an attempt throughout to wrestle something controlled from a very rough surfaced watercolour paper.  I added Tripoli type triangles into the band, Mooka Flowers anchored with black bands and a wobbly line fill that I saw Margaret Bremner use to far greater effect on one of her eco-dyed pieces.  I shaded with coloured pencils and a little graphite.  And I'm fairly pleased with how it came out.  

I like that glassy window through the band to the Andromeda lying beneath.  Which feels apt on these suddenly freezing days that are gripping the UK, just as we all assumed spring was close - not quite, but if we look carefully it's there waiting for us, if only we have a little more patience.

farewell for now

It's time for my last post for the year.  I've been to all sorts of places tanglewise this year - plenty of new adventures and old favourites.  And what better way to end than a fusion of the two.

This tile has been sitting quietly on my Leftovers Pile since Adele's 95th String Thing Challenge - way back in the summer of 2015.  Who knows why I got no further than I did.  Who knows what waylaid or distracted me or stole my time.

Forgotten but not gone

But the hint of the frame that I'd started to draw on that square of repurposed packaging seemed a perfect place to lay a section of new official tangle Rumpus.  A touch of festive colours, a touch of white chalk, some graphite and a few dots of silver paint and there it is.

This one asked to be viewed at an angle!

Summer meets winter, old meets new, forgotten meets newly found.  As this year nudges up to the next thanks for sharing it with me, and until the next one, take care.

hello darkness, my old friend

Sometimes I wonder if the tangles I chose to use and the colours I select on any given day bear relation to what's on my mind, or what's going on in the world.  Maybe not, but I can't rule it out.  As the UK election pounds toward its conclusion my sense of hope tinged with doom casts a shadow over everything I do.  And so I find myself making heavy use of black in recent tiles.  None more so than on these two.

I selected a couple of tiles from my Leftovers pile. A striped green one that I did very early on in my dabblings with colour - I've often been drawn to the colours but found the strong stripes off putting.  But breaking them up with some dark curls showcasing a variation of Papermint that Sandy Hunter recently shared on Facebook really did the trick.  I was tempted to leave the centre section empty and then changed my mind and popped in another Sandy tangle - a nameless one I admired on one of her blog posts.      

 

I feel a sense of hope when I look at this tile - it's like I'm peering through vines and ferns in a magical forest and the green of livingness is so vivid I feel I could taste it, and there just ahead is a sparkling curtain of water droplets, perhaps a waterfall, perhaps just a tree shaking off the recent rain.

Things took a darker turn with the second tile.  This crazed background I made a while ago while testing out my Brusho powders.  They have a certain charm but are hard to tame - perhaps better to let them do their thing and then work with them rather than against.  I saw crushed berries and bruises before I began, but perhaps the influence of the Dracula television series we are currently watching seeped in because this is what happened when I added three sections of 2V (recently shared on Tanglepatterns).

2V is a great tangle, striking for it's ability to look great even without shading.  But it's one that, for me at least, needs a lot of concentration not to make a mistake on.  The section on the left went very well, with only a tiny error, but when I started on the one on the right it all started to fall apart, when I made a few wrong connections and divided a couple of my sections into too small a triangles!  It looks like it's collapsing, unable to hold itself with the elegance of the section on the left.  But I think we all have days when we feel like that!  

There's an undeniable darkness to this tile - I imagine myself in a desecrated church, staring up at the stained glass windows and wondering how much longer they will hold themselves together.  I also picture bloody pennants hung from the ramparts of victor's castles.  And while it's felt tooth and nail at times lately, thankfully we don't decide our leaders on the battlefield these days!

cutting the string

My work on this week's Diva tile - in which we were invited to Duotangle with Molygon and Marasu - was strange from start to finish.

Firstly I selected a pre-coloured tile from my Leftovers stack.  I immediately found it rather unappealing, but decided to stick with what I'd picked.

I then had a 'clever' idea of making it so the Molygon looked cut out with the Marasu viewed through the holes.  Which seemed better in my imagination than it looked on paper! 

Then I thought that lots of black ink might come to the rescue...  and I selected a sky blue pen that I rarely use...

... and well, who knows.  It's an odd one, not one of my favourites, but it is what it is.

But the strangest thing occurred only once I stepped back from it.  When I'm not tangling I write, and much of what I write about involves memory.  My mind is a kite - dancing this way and that in the sky, sometimes in cloud, sometimes in the clear blue.  But when I'm not actively thinking, actively remembering - when I'm doing something that shifts my mind in a different way - like tangling does - it's like the kite string has been cut.  I drift to wildly unexpected places.  When I looked at the tile I got a sudden flash of a perfume my mother used when I was a child - not the smell but the packaging.   I hadn't thought of it in years, but a quick Google and there it was - an almost exact replica of the striping on my Marasu.  How weird and wonderful!

a woven window

Laura the Diva and I are worlds apart - in terms of geography and life and many other things I'm sure.  While she might find cheer in Earth, Wind and Fire, I find comfort in polishing small poems about the moon.  But what unites us is this thing we do, this place we come to - these little tiles of paper that welcome us.  Her challenge this week - to use Keeko - was perfect.

I grabbed a tile from the Leftovers pile.  I coloured this one a long, long time ago.  Back when I always used a string.  Back when I left one deckle edge uncut on my tiles.  Back when I didn't have quite so many colours to choose from.  And I dived straight it. 

Knowing Keeko so well - because it's so simple, not because I use it often - meant I didn't have to look up the step out.  I used other tangles that I knew from memory too - those beloved basics like Crescent Moon and Fescu.  It was a delight to get lost in the tangling, the shading.  The feel of pen on paper.  The no up nor down but somehow a pleasing symmetry arises.  Sometimes that's the best we can hope for. 

Whether it's the act of drawing that loosens up my writing brain or the images themselves I often find forgotten memories returning to me when I tangle.  Today, clearly provoked by my tile, I recall that when I was a child my mother had a small collection of corn dollies that hung on the wall above the kitchen window.  In ancient times these were hollow shapes woven from the last ear of corn harvested.  The spirit of the corn would spend winter within them before the dolly was ploughed back into the earth in spring.  As the days grow shorter I might just put this tile in a frame to see us all through winter.

mellow leafiness

This week's Diva Challenge took a turn for the autumnal - always a welcome area for me to explore.  Love the colours, love the shapes, love the poetic opportunities of the season.

I remembered seeing a tile on my Leftovers Pile that I'd previously drawn some leaf-strings onto.  Time to work some life into that stalled square...  

I challenged myself not to over think this one.  So just picked three tangles that I'd been playing with over the last couple of weeks and used those to fill the three leaves.  I added some colour - which came out a bit more muted than I planned, but now I'm done I really like the subtle tones.  There's a time for vibrancy, and a time for something a bit more misty.  It needed a border to stop those leaves looking lost on the tile.  Plus some shading of course.  And there you have it!

A trio of leaves - Florez, Claws and Verve

warming up

I haven't spent much time tangling in the last week as I came down with a nasty cold.  I'm getting better each day, but to get myself back into the swing of drawing a steady line I thought I'd grab a half finished tile from the Leftovers Pile. 

This is the one I grabbed. It was an idea for a new tangle I was playing with in the run up to Christmas last year - when my eyes were full of snowflakes and stars.  Something wasn't working quite right, so I abandoned both tile and tangle.


But I spent time with it yesterday, adding a few more detail lines, some lines with beads and Cruffle, and some colouring which made the centres look almost pearl-like. 

Slowly I started to realise how this strange little tangle actually resembles microscopic images of viruses.  Not necessarily the most pleasant inspiration, but versatile and very apt considering my recent incapacity! 

I drew a quick step-out and named my tangle Tira - which sounds like it could be a new strain of virus, one that makes its sufferers reach for black pens and spend hours drawing intricate patterns!

[If you use Tira I hope you have fun, and would love to know how you get on with it.  I don't think I've seen anything too similar on my tangle travels, but if it repeats a previous tangle, or name, please let me know and I'll remove it.]

warts and all

After my last blog post, where I shared a page from my sketchbook, I received so many warm and enthusiastic comments.  I began to think that this might work as a regular feature on my blog - a place where I periodically share a recent page and show the tiles that emerged from it.  Inevitably it takes a few weeks from me starting a page (and dating it) to filling it and then only later the ideas and trials filter through to finish tiles.

And so, let me take you back to mid August, when I began this page -

You can see a little cluster of practice gems in the corner - these eventually made it onto the Zendala I shared in my last post.  Sometimes ideas from more than one page have to learn to work together!  I'm relatively new to gems and didn't get off to a great start when in haste I grabbed a chalk marker instead of a blender - hence the dull milky look to a few of them!

You can see my Drogon practice which went onto a tile for an Olympic themed It's a String Thing challenge.  A little burst of Jenna Black's Starcrossed got repeated several times on a very warm looking tile.  And that strange fusion of A-dalfa and Viaduct become the start of a tile that I will send to someone else on the Travelling Tangles Project (I've started to accumulate a little stack of pre-prepared tiles so I have some to hand any time I need to send one, or more).

And then things started to get really dark!  I had a tile that didn't work out - a while back I'd tried to prepare a background that vaguely resembled the Aurora Borealis - but it looked a mess.  So onto the pending pile it went.  But then I spotted it and thought I'd have a go using the very spikey 3V.  I darkened some sections, and filled others with Baton and an alternative version of Hypnotic that's been doing the rounds (and that featured on the sketchbook page before this one!).  It's a crazy tile but I like it for that!

Another beast that rose from the darkest depths is this Trelina (a tangle by Eni Oken) climbing through the A-dalfa frame.  The background was one of my first attempts at using distress inks.  I also did some coloured shading and also threw in some bubbles and white highlights.  And you have to take my word for the fact it looks much better in real life - the scanner doesn't like the deep colours.

There are a few other little scraps of this and that on the page that didn't make it onto a tile, but you never know, they might do soon...

going with the flow

This was one of those tangling occasions where I set off with no direction in mind, no plan as to what might end up on the tile. 

It began as a test to see whether there was a compatibility problem with using my fine line pens over some new watercolours.  I'd had some clogging problems when practicing, but think maybe I hadn't let the paint dry completely (I can tend to impatience!).  The pens still complain a little over areas that include hints of the metallic paint - a bit of silver in this case - but not enough to even have to clean the nib.  I was also trialing a newer smoother (and cheaper than my usual) watercolour paper - and apart from a slight wrinkling it did well.  So equipment wise it was a success. 

But even more satisfying was the look of the tile.  It began as simple wash of a fairly bright green, with a few blue streaks and some silver on top.  As I began tangling some Diva Dance I felt that was all that should be on the tile, with a few added Orbs.  Very minimal shading but a bit of coloured pencil to accent the Orbs.  And there you have it.  Very relaxing to do and the pleasure shines through in the piece I think.

catch 'em if you can

Last week I launched my Leftovers Project - an ongoing aim to use up those left-on-the-pile tiles.

This week's Diva Challenge gives me the perfect oppurtunity to grab another and use it.  This tile has been on the heap for a long time - in fact I've got a sneaking suspicion I probably drew the string for a previous circle based Diva challenge...

I filled the varying sized circles with a new variation of N'Zeppel that appeared in my sketchbook yesterday, as well as a couple of other tangles I've used lately and still have their hooks in my mind (Cat-kin and Crescent Moon).  I added colour using some new paints - that I clearly need to practice with more, because they came out a fair bit more intense than I expected.  Some stippling softened the surround.

I like the finished tile - it reminds me of thought bubbles drifting by - some calm, some complex, none likely to last long.

waste not, want not

I dislike waste in all areas of life.  I clear my plate every night, take care to not buy more than I need, and recycle or donate anything I no longer want that still has a little life in it.

And of course I don't throw away tiles that have 'gone wrong'.  Instead I tuck them into the little basket where a handful of fresh blank tiles live and hope to come back to them one day.  But I rarely do.  The stack just builds up.

There's all sorts of tiles in there.  Ones that I started and then lost my way, lost my faith.  One that are nothing more than a string.  Experiments in colour that then overwhelmed me when it came to placing a line on them.  And some that are almost finished and then fell at the final hurdle.  Misshapes, mistakes, misfits.

I've been muttering to myself about doing something with them for a long time.  So, now is the time.  To launch a sometimes project to give a new lease of life to those unloved tiles.  Starting with this one...

 ... a couple of blobs, squiggles and a spray of blue on a cream tile.  With no fixed plan I tangled a large section of Arukas, Papermint in one blob, Crescent Moon in the other.  Some creeping auras and then some Wool (with fills of Msst and Tipple).  I then shaded with graphite and a slightly dubious choice of two coloured pencils which I'm trying hard not to regret!