Welcome to BLOG Zentangle. To learn about Zentangle, visit our website, read our free newsletters, take a class with a local Certified Zentangle Teacher (CZT), and best of all . . . create your own!


Friday, August 31, 2012

Anything is possible . . .

Anything is possible, one stroke at a time.™

Now, imagine taking a picture of each stroke (974 pictures to be precise) and creating a time-lapse video. That's what Zachary did.

We invite you to enjoy this wonderful visual treat. Zach calls it "Zentangle in Motion" and you can view it here on his blog.


It's only a few minutes long. We think you'll love it.

Thanks so much, Zach, for putting that together.

R&M

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Monday, August 27, 2012

Zentangle Community

Our friends at Sakura just put together this neat Zentangle Community video that is fun to watch. It's a sweet compilation of tanglers of all ages creating Zentangle art.



Enjoy!

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Sunday, August 26, 2012

Is Mother Tangling Again?

Rick writes:

I think Mother Nature tangles.

I was out paddling this morning on a nearby river and saw this plant on the surface.


After paddling past it I turned around. It had reminded me of tripoli because each leaf was separated from the others much like triangles in tripoli.

When I took a second pass paddling by, I could see all the stems of the outer leaves effectively "drawn behind" successively inner leaves and stems in hollibaugh fashion.

With an obvious appearance of pokeroot's variant, pokeleaf, it was time for a third pass. This time I slowed, carefully kneeled down (I was stand-up paddling), fished out my phone for its camera, and took this picture.

I was excited to get home and explore possible deconstructions!

However, what I thought would be a simple task because of so many resonances with other tangles, quickly proved to be more difficult. All my efforts soon turned into drawing, not tangling. I realized that I was encountering one of my long-standing deconstruction puzzles, Fibonacci spirals.

Fibonacci spirals are often seen in nature as spirals that go in different directions. Sometimes you will see them on a flat surface like the face of a sunflower whose seeds are arranged in those spirals. Sometimes you will see spirals formed on a round surface by facets of a pineapple or scales of a pine cone.

In this plant, I realized its leaves were arranged that larger familiar pattern of counter-rotating spirals.

Here I've traced spirals going in one direction:



And here in the opposite direction:



Here they are together:



Notice there are 5 blue spirals and 8 red spirals. A neat trick you can play when you find something with counter-rotating spirals is to count the spirals in one direction. It will probably be a Fibonacci number. Whatever Fibonacci number it may be, the number of spirals going the opposite direction will be the Fibonacci number next to that first number—either the next higher, or the next lower.

However, I still haven't figured out how to deconstruct this pattern so it can be drawn as a tangle. "Drawn as a tangle" means that you repeat a series of elemental strokes in a certain structured way so you inevitably end up with a particular pattern without needing to know what the pattern you are creating is supposed to look like.

Usually the number of elemental strokes needed are 3 or less. Often, you only need one or two. By "elemental strokes" we mean a dot, a straight(-ish) line, a curve (like a parenthesis), a reverse curve (like an "S"), and an orb or circle.

It also has to be done without any underlying pencil structure or preplanned grid.

This is a challenge I've been working on for some time. We invite you to join in figuring out its deconstruction.

Let us know what you find. Either post a link below, or email it to us.

If you are interested in learning more about Fibonacci numbers and their (phi) proportions, this web site is a great starting point.

Enjoy!

Click images for larger views.

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Seminar IX

This blog is the companion photo-journal for this newsletter.

Certified Zentangle Teachers of Seminar IX

Zentangle banner welcomes attendees

Gallery in lobby

Gallery in classroom

Close-ups of items in classroom gallery:







  

Smile!

Tangle instruction in ASL

Name tags

Seminar ensemble

We tangle coasters

Adding to mosaic

Happy Birthday!

Rick, Jean, Sue, Jess, Martha, Maria, and Molly

We are so grateful to have this opportunity to make so many friends and to look forward to working together.

We will announce our 2013 seminar schedule in a newsletter as soon as we sort out dates.

If you are interested in learning more about our CZT program, please see this page.

Click images for larger views.
 


Sunday, August 5, 2012

Playing a'Round

Yesterday Maria was working on a free-form Zendala tile. When she went to shade the outer part, she began with a sepia pencil she grabbed by "mistake." She continued nonetheless and finished with some white Gellyroll highlights.

Check out the interweaving of double-ended poke-leaf that are threaded behind successive layers of auraknot.


While we're on the subject of auraknot, when I logged in to write this blog, I saw the first image on this blog post by Margaret Bremner, CZT. Check out the tangleation of auraknot with cadent along with her other tiles!

Enjoy!


 Click image for larger view.