Art Journal Every Day: Tangling With Color
July 22, 2011
I am back from CHA with much to share. And will update you as soon as I can (if I owe you an e-mail I plan to spend the weekend dealing with my 1,130 unread messages). Until then...
If you're new to Art Journal Every Day, all the posts can be found here. Please read this post first. There is a flickr group for sharing right here. Remember, it's just ten minutes of nourishing your creative self every day! No need to finish anything or even like it. Just play! You can join the linky list for July right here.
Today we have a fantastic guest post from Carolyn Brady about "tangling" with color! (You can see me in an episode of Scrapbook Memories TV doing a segment about Zentangling here.) Carolyn's ideas are so fantastic and unique! I think you're going to love her post!
Julie asked me to write a bit about using tangles in my art journal. Often called Zentangles®, tangles are repeating patterns that take your doodling to a higher level. The Zentangle® website discusses drawing tangle patterns as a form of meditation, but I admit that I mainly use it as a way to fill that big empty journal page!
I’ve learned from previous 365 projects to keep low expectations of what I’m going to accomplish each day. I generally work on one spread over the course of a week or more, adding a little bit of pencil or ink or color each day. I am a tortoise, not a hare. (For the days when I forget, I write a little note the next day explaining why I didn’t get anything done yesterday.) Similar to Julie’s grid of faces in June, my May entries were tangle designs from Sandy Steen Bartholomew’s book Totally Tangled.
I started out by drawing a grid (you can see the grid clearly on the right side) in pencil and then doing a few tangles a day with a black Pitt pen, each square listing the design name and date. June was a particularly busy month for me, so much of my daily art journaling was spent in coloring the black and white patterns drawn in May.
I used Letraset markers, Twinkling H20 watercolors, and Prismacolor pencils to color in the patterns, Coloring in the patterns can be very relaxing.
Eventually each black and white page was transformed into a colorful tangle reference:
If these designs look complicated, never fear. You can find step-by-step instructions for many tangles on-line. Check out Sandy Bartholomew’s Tangle of the Week or Sandra Strait’s blog Life Imitates Doodles. There’s also a Zentangle® Flickr group. If you don’t like the look of the grid layout, you can fill a page at random.
I will leave you with the warning: Tangles are addictive!
Carolyn Brady had dabbled in drawing, painting, collage, needlework, and other traditional arts since childhood, before finally discovering that she could combine all these together through mixed-media art. Her current obsessions include art quilts, small assemblages and ATCs. She has taught classes in altered books, artist trading cards and collage and is the organizer of the Milwaukee Artist Trading Card group and a member of the Ten Two Studios design team.
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