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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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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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.

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.

 

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.

mi^2 (x 80!)

Laura Harms' challenge #80 is "Mi2! Mi2!". Mi² is a great tangle developed by Mimi Lempart, CZT.

Here is Maria's contribution . . .

. . . and her comments.

I love when something unexpected happens in life. I assume that is why mi² "sparkles" so much as a tangle for me. With very little effort, the lines and shapes create an impossible Escher-like situation. There's no way that one layer—whether metal, glass or paper—can recreate what these series of simple strokes eloquently evoke.  (But what a fun sculpting or 3D printing exploration this could be!)

Life is a Zentangle! I love and embrace it as it is.

Click image for larger view.
Click this link for some tips on drawing mi².

A Basic Comfort

We recently received this email . . .

Hi guys, Am I a dweeb for wanting to stick with basic tangles? I love the simple, basic designs. The advanced stuff is nice, but I like where I'm at. I feel kinda bad with all the fancy designs on the net and my basic designs aren't anything to write home about, but I like them. It's impossible to make it into the Who's Who of Zentangle unless my Tangles are over the top. This is discouraging at times. 

Thank you for writing. This brings up such an important point.

The charm of Zentangle's method is that you can relax into the pleasure of creating "one stroke at a time" without concern for the outcome. We often speak of Zentangle as a practice. We never speak of it as a competition.

A useful analogy is reading. Would you enjoy a book better if you could read it faster? Perhaps you could read more books, but at what cost? When you can afford to read at a comfortable pace you can savor a turn of phrase, look up a new word, or gaze into an unfocused distance as you imagine a setting and see yourself in it.

It's also relaxing to read an author with whose style and characters you already know and enjoy. It's not necessary to always read a new author on a new subject every time you pick up a book.

Same with Zentangle. Or a walk in the woods. Or cooking.

Maria writes:

Where is it written that we must constantly strive for more complex and focused tangles? There is something to be said for tried and true, simple and familiar . . . like "mac & cheese" vs. the latest recipe on a food blog. My "mac & cheese" tangle is mooka; Rick's is flux. It's the one I start tangling when I need to draw and not think. Maybe I throw in a bit of poke-leaf sometimes.

Every time I draw mooka something morphs. It looks nothing like the original plans I might have had when I began . . . it grabs other tangles and ingests their aspects all on its own.

But for me, comfort it is.

Rick continues . . .

We both sat down yesterday afternoon (Sunday) to create two basic tiles:

Maria did mooka; I did flux. It looks like Maria surfed mooka whereas I walked my well-worn flux pathway and added some familiar hollibaugh. We did these independently. After we finished and I saw them together, I remarked to Maria about how many similarities these quite different tiles shared.

I did my tile with traditional corner dots, border, and a "Z" shaped string. My flux and hollibaugh almost always look the same from tile to tile. For me, this is part of their charm and why that email struck such a chord. Often my favorite part is shading what I've just tangled but with this tile I most enjoyed coloring in the black behind hollibaugh.

Thanks again to the writer of that email for the inspiration to create these tiles and have this conversation.

Maria continues . . .

I say, draw whatever tangle makes you happy at that moment. That is the essence of Zentangle, enjoying putting pen to paper one stroke at a time. It feels so good to enjoy that moment without fretting about an outcome or someone else's opinion. 

So, if you want to learn a new tangle (or explore a new path or try a new food), that's fine. But most times what you want is a comfort tangle; and then, comfort tangles it is!

• Tried
• True
• Simple
• Familiar

So, what are your "Mac & Cheese" tangles?  (And, why?)

Click images for more basic comfort.