Zentangle

I first heard/read about zentangles about a year ago. They sell kits for $49 plus shipping but at the time that was too steep a price for me. In the past couple of months I have been encountering zentangles more frequently and recently decided to just buy the kit. It came last week.

The kit is very nice. I'm such a sucker for good packaging! It comes in a beautiful box.

The box is designed to sit flat like this or you can stand it on end and put it on a bookcase. Inside the kit is a DVD, an instruction booklet, a legend card (shows examples of different fill designs that are numbered), a die (roll the die and draw the fill design that corresponds to the number rolled), two pencils with a sharpener, a blender stick, two Micron pigma pens, and a generous amount of tiles made from very nice paper for drawing your zentangles on.

The DVD is just 28 minutes of watching someone draw three different zentangles while music plays. No words are necessary. Just watching someone do a few is all the instruction you need. The instruction booklet and legend card give many examples of fill designs. However, any fill design you can imagine will work. This is why I decided to go ahead and get the kit. Any free motion quilting design is a fill design! I am learning that drawing helps me with my quilting and zentangles are fun to draw.

Do you need to buy the kit to draw zentangles? No. In fact I have done some on regular paper and on water color paper. I wanted the booklet, the nice paper tiles and pens and was curious about the DVD. I like using good quality materials and the paper tiles in the kit along with the pens are very nice. You can buy these separately though.

Here is my very first zentangle creation.

At first I thought the 3" by 3" tile would be too small, but after doing some larger ones I think this smaller size is the perfect size for getting the hang of drawing this way. I can envision doing these patterns on cloth with stitch, beads, buttons and other embellishments. In fact, I know there is a new book just out on this very same subject.

Zentangle for Fabric and Quilts on YouTube

You can watch the video here or go to YouTube and search for the title. You may be able to view a larger version directly on YouTube.

Goldie likes zentangles too.

She also likes water.

I finally had to put her out of my room and shut the door so I could finish. I did a 6" by 6" zentangle on watercolor paper and colored it with my Inktense watercolor pencils. This is my first try at the "Spilling Over" theme for March in the Sketchbook Challenge.

My idea is that the color is spilling over. I like the way the orange "spills over" and the blue isn't bad, but the others are not at all what I envisioned. I'll have to try again. I'm having a hard time with the theme this month. It just isn't speaking to me.

Radiator Quilt

I had my annual check-up on Tuesday of last week. I took my sketchbook with me to the appointment and drew this sketch in the waiting room.

The waiting room has a whole wall of windows with a hot water base board radiator running underneath the windows. I just liked the lines, the juxtaposition of horizontal and vertical (opposites of a sort), so I just quickly drew the lines.

Later that same day I was in another waiting room. This time the dentist office waiting while my son got his teeth cleaned. I drew this sketch and didn't even finish it. This sketch is derived from the first in that I took the little rounded rectangles from the radiator cover and scattered them over the page.

I thought about this sketch for the rest of the week, frustrated because I had no free time to explore it further. Saturday dawned and I found myself with a few free hours. The husband did not go skiing and instead took the boy out to breakfast and then to Science Saturday. Ahhh! I didn't even shower, just took my coffee and went straight to my sewing room.

My plan was to work on my challenge with Stephanie. We are doing the curved piecing exercise this month. So I pulled some solids and started.

I got to here and thought to myself I wonder how this would look if I used the idea from my second radiator sketch. So I got out some freezer paper and drew some rounded rectangles on it.

I cut out the rounded rectangles carefully using an Exacto knife and a ruler. Then I adhered it to my pieced fabric.

This is okay, but I don't get the pieced lines going both vertical and horizontal with this. So I put the cut out rounded rectangles on the pieced fabric.

Yes. Now I can get both horizontal and vertical lines in my rounded rectangles. Then I chose a background fabric - Kona medium gray. I adhered the freezer paper to it and using the starch method, cut out the rounded rectangles and starched back the seam allowances.

I cut out the rounded rectangles from the pieced fabric, leaving a 1/4 inch seam allowance all around. I left the freezer paper on top so that I could line them up properly in the windows of the gray fabric. Using my machine and gray thread, I sewed the pieced parts to the gray fabric. Here is how it looked before removing the freezer paper.

And then after removing the freezer paper.

I should say that I removed the freezer paper from the gray fabric before sewing the pieced fabrics into the windows.

I quilted pebbles on the gray.

And now I am embellishing the pieced fabrics with hand stitching. I love how this all started with a very rough sketch in the waiting area of the doctor's office!

UFO Bust Report and More

My UFO Bust Report is easy this week. I finished nothing, I worked on nothing. Well, I didn't work on any UFO projects.

I worked in my sketchbook some. The new theme for February is up - Opposites.

I did a "brainstorm" page.

And then did one for "curvy and straight."

I like this month's theme better than last month. I had lots of ideas for last month, but not many that I felt comfortable attempting to draw and then share.

I have also started on my guild's annual challenge. This year the theme is "birds of a feather" with an emphasis on "feather." There is an added twist this year, the finished quilt must be able to be hung from a branch! In addition, the maximum size is 10" per side. Usually we have a minimum of 18" per side with a maximum of 36" per side. The quilts are due at our April meeting.

I won't be able to show you much because I know that there are guild members who read my blog. But I will show you some teaser photos.

I am basing my project on this sketch I made recently. Some of the fabrics I'm using are below.

Since the finished quilt can be no more than 10" square, I've made good progress on my first attempt at interpreting the theme. We can make up to three entries. I currently have two ideas I really like so I'll be making at least 2 quilts. I may do more and then have a grouping that I can hang together in my house some where.

Finally, I'll leave you with a Goldie picture since I haven't posted one recently.

She is getting so big!

January Sketchbook Pages

The theme for the sketchbook challenge for this month is "highly prized." I have been doing a lot of sketching compared to what I am accustomed to doing. In reality it has been once, maybe twice, a week for at least 30 minutes a session. These are the sketches I posted on the Flickr group.

I chose these images to post for "highly prized" not because they are images of things I highly prize, although I do like trees and birds, but for what they represent to me. That is, spending time learning something new and realizing that I can draw something I like. Just taking the time to experiment with drawing and allowing myself to redraw the same thing, tweeking parts of the image and/or changing it to try something new, just to see what the change looks like.

Sketchbook Page, 2

The other day Diana Trout did a video for the sketchbook challenge blog about a doodle game. The link will take you to the blog entry with the video. The basic idea is that you draw a continuous line over the page and then go back and fill in the areas created by the continuous line. I had some time to kill on Friday afternoon while one of my students took an exam so I brought my sketchbook with me and did the exercise.

I only filled in some of the areas, the ones that spoke to me at the time. It was actually a pretty fun little exercise! Next time I will try to create a few more areas that "will speak to me" than I did the first time. Another thing I have been doing as a warm up exercise I learned from a class I took at Quilt University taught by Lily Kerns. The class was titled Playing with Lines and Shapes. She had us draw in little boxes.

I have found this to be a very helpful exercise for working out a design. You can draw the image over and over, keeping what you like from previous versions and trying out new ideas. The boxes are small. There are 25 on a standard 8.5" by 11" sheet of paper. If you draw something you like, you can scan it and enlarge it then print it out if you don't want to try redrawing it larger.

Most of the images on this page I drew while watching the Secret of the Kells. It was recommended to me by Netflix. It is animated movie targeted at kids my sons age. I did not really like the movie at all, but for me, the art work was inspiring. So I watched the whole thing and paused the movie at various points to draw things of interest to me in one of the little boxes.

Sketchbook Page, 1

You may have noticed the Sketchbook Challenge button on the right hand side of my blog. (click the button for more information on the Sketchbook Challenge) Yesterday I received the watercolor pencils I ordered for the Challenge. I'd really like to be able to draw better and the only way to learn is to do it. So I'm trying.

The reviews all said that they create intense color, not the usual kind of washed out color of watercolors. They were right! I enjoyed playing with these this morning and learned several things. Specifically, I learned why you should use watercolor paper when doing a watercolor project. My first attempt with these was in my sketchbook. It is made with thicker paper, but it is not watercolor paper. The paper bubbled up badly as soon as I put water on it. Luckily, I have some watercolor paper that I bought for my son. I haven't given it to him yet, so now it is mine. Maybe I'll share though.

I think a more experienced watercolor artist might find using these pencils a bit tedious. It requires two steps whereas watercolor paints require just one. First you color an area with the pencil. They color just like colored pencils. Then you drag a wet brush across the colored area and watch the magic happen.

I took some photos of my play. Here is my sketch with a little coloring. Notice that the bottom half circle is darker than the others along the stem. I had already put water on that one before I thought to grab my camera. But it gives you a really good idea of the color change that happens with water.

Then I drew in more details on the flower part and finished coloring. On this photo (below) I have painted with water the right half of the stem and all of the half circles.

Then I painted the whole thing with water. I tried several different sizes of brush and found that a very small, fine brush worked best for me. I may need to get a few more. You can really see a dramatic difference in the colors between the above and below photos!

Lastly I outlined (redrew my original pencil lines) with black marker.

Unfortunately, the center of the flower reminds me of the character in those horror films "Scream." I've never seen the movies, but I've seen images of that character all over the place. So maybe I should call this one Scream Flower. Oh well! I was really just playing with my new pencils and I had a great time with them.