Couldn't we all use an "uneventful nice day" right about now?

Good heavens, days are rolling past so quickly and I've had no creative time due to the meditation course I'm taking (which finishes in late June).  My "inner creative natives" are getting extremely restless so I snuck this quick drawing in today in my sketchbook, but now need to go back to studying.

It's from Kelly Barone's new book, Drawing Botanicals.  Her book comes fully illustrated with step-by-step drawings, and each has a link to a video for drawing that particular flower.  There must be 150+ flowers (each linked to it's own short video) in the book. They go from A-Z, from African Daisy to Zinnia.  I am highly recommending it, and you'd be supporting a working artist.   Click on the link above to order a copy.  (And don't go by my quick sketch above--you can do even better, I'm sure!

It's amazing how quickly one's skills can deteriorate when one doesn't use them.  I used to be far better with the colored pencils than I am now--can't wait to be putting in regular practice again later this summer.  Kelly is a watercolor artist extraordinaire--you will really enjoy looking at her full website HERE.  I dream of someday creating the subtle beauty she produces--I love her work.

I paired the sketch above with my favorite springtime poem by Lilja Rogers:  "First a howling blizzard woke us; then the rains came down to soak us.  Now, before the eye can focus--Crocus."  Every year in the spring this poem makes me laugh.  May it have the same effect on you.  I fell in love with it the first time I read it, decades ago.  Reciting it is a spring ritual for me.

Ah yes, Daylight Saving Time started last night and I got approximately 3 hours of sleep.  I probably should never have tried tanglng today, and this was the result.  Not my best, but it 'still counts as practice, so I'm happy.

And now for some zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...

Still thinking that less would be more with each of these...however, i am enjoying drawing and painting them.

And I am keeping my practice up, which is the important thing.

This is part of the Magical Stars project designed by Sandyha Manne, CZT (scroll back a few days to Day One for more info on the Project).

Yesterday's post showed the linework for this.  I drew it from the first video in Sandhya Manne's video series, Magical Stars.  Click on her name for the link to her website and more information.  I modified the drawing very slightly and also added colored pencil to my watercolors.  I love using both media in one piece--it's one of my favorite ways to color things.

I'm keeping in mind the following quote here:

“Start copying what you love. Copy copy copy copy. At the end of the copy you will find your self.”                ― Austin Kleon. from Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative

Thank you, Sandhya, for offering your work to the rest of us to use for practice and learning!  At this (temporary) point in time when I don't have time for my own art, learning from folks like you is a treasure.

Also, that Kleon book I referenced above is terrific.

A final drawing from Kelly Barone's free 2024 Botanical Drawing course <whimsybykelly.com>, done using graphite, black Micron 01, and General's chalk pencils.

Nothing at all posted in August.  How did that happen?

Well, I know.  I was finishing up another rug and you know how long that takes.  And then I did something I said I wouldn't do:  signed up for another ten months of meditation teacher training.  I just couldn't resist.  It will teach me one more thing that I've always wanted to learn, a certain specific protocol for coaching students.  It kicked off last week and so far I am loving it.

It seems to be allowing me slightly more time in my days, so I'm trying to start drawing again.  My gosh, it's start over, start over, start over (just like meditation) with drawing as I never get a stretch of time to draw consistently. 

And whose fault is that?  Mine, obviously.

I managed to color the peony later in the day, so here is the colored version (done with Prisma Colored pencils and some light gold gellyroll pen):

Well of course there are mistakes.  We all make mistakes. 

I made some major mistakes in drawing this tangle, Waybop.  I've drawn it before but not for a couple of years.  I really screwed up the linework on this tile.

But here's the thing:  "There are no mistakes in Zentangle®."  That's one of our axioms.  Because just like in life, we have to deal with whatever's right in front of us and work with it, mistakes or not.

So I didn't tear up this tile.  I kept it overnight and decided to try coloring it.  Here below is the result. 

Glad I held onto it and decided to keep working on it.  I've ended up really liking it a lot.  I chose colors to match the oriental rugs in a friend's  home.

This entire  process was an experiment.
Could I produce this tangle from memory?  No, I couldn't and the original linework was terrible.  But...I could continue to work with it and end up with a good result.

It required only patience and determination.  Lesson learned.

In this incredibly troubled world, I was lucky enough to be able to take three days for travel and drawing. 

Nearly every second of that time, I was acutely aware of the many tragedies currently unfolding on our fragile blue planet, and acutely aware of the great privilege to be able to have the peace that drawing can provide.  Over all three days, I carried both worlds with me simultaneously.  I think we all did.  There were about 40 of us in attendance, with Martha Huggins and Molly Hollibaugh from Zentangle® as our teachers.  I'll post a few of the results over the next couple of days.

A "warm-up tile" from the first evening.

It can be nearly impossible to find a way to cope with life at times like this.  So many people I know are exhausted, angry, disillusioned, terrified, and feeling helpless.  I cannot and do not ignore that nor any of the existential threats we face at the moment.  Yet who can function with any measure of wisdom or compassion in such a state?  We must all try to take a moment whenever we can to recognize both the possibilities AND the limitations we face.  And then find a scrap of inner peace and sit with that until we can un-clench.

Any healthy thing that can give us that moment is precious.  Drawing is one thing that does it for me.  Music as well.  Speaking with friends.  Helping someone who needs help. 

In order to be functional, I need to do this in small moments throughout the day so that I won't get lost in discouragement.  We all need some way of doing this--desperately.  I am fortunate enough to be able to occasionally stop and just draw for a while.  I know that others on the planet who are being bombed or shot at do not have that luxury right now. 

I do it both for myself and for the people who don't have that option, in the hope that calming myself will enable me to think and act more clearly to support them in their time of need.

Kaira Jewel Lingo has just written a book called We Were Made for These Times, about how to survive and cope with the turmoil currently gripping the world.  You can listen to her by clicking on the link below, as she's interviewed by former ABC News Anchor Dan Harris.

May we all find shelter and safety
May we all find peace within and without
May we all be kind to ourselves and each other
May we all become whole.

Great Jumpin' Jehosophat, would you believe it took me no less than SIX tries to get this knot done correctly?  (I used a different, non-publishable word while catching all my errors and trying to figure it out, not the initial three words at the start of this paragraph.  Use your imagination.)  The tangle around the outside of the knot is called A'dalfa.  It was new to me and I had fun with it.  But the knot!  OMG.  I'm knot sure why it was so hard for me.

Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “Learn from the mistakes of others. You can't live long enough to make them all yourself.”

Um, Eleanor, I think I have news for you.

No symptoms and 2 negative Covid tests, 48 hours apart, after an exposure last Saturday.  A perfect example of an occasion when negative - good news.  (As it often does with medical data)  Hurrah!

I celebrated by combining a Celtic Knot with Zentangle® again:

Just for now, I'm enjoying combining tangling with knots so you may be seeing a lot of these.

Let's see:  D for the Dharma, for daylight, for delight, for deliberate.  Also for do-over, for doubt, for demand, for "duh...", for ditto...I could go on, but won't.  This is another illustrated letter using sketchbook paper (5x7"), black Micron 01, watercolor and colored pencil, plus a bit of graphite and white gellyroll.  Great fun to do. Tangles are:  Rixty, Tipple, Mooka, Printemps, Flux, Moonpie, I Can This, Zinger.

Another photo from my sketchbook this morning.  This one really made me chuckle--is it an anemone or a padula?

Never heard of a padula?  A padula is a made-up flower.  In other words, not a particular specific, identifiable flower.  It's the type of flower kids often draw, not an accurate rendering.  We use the term in rug hooking to describe those colorful fantasy flowers you often see in old rugs.  It may also be a term used in other arts, but I've never heard of it anywhere else.

This is supposed to be an anemone, but I'm not too certain about how accurate it is.

Doesn't matter to me.  Drawing it was fun and meditative.  That's all I care about.

Here's a page from my sketchbook showing some practice at drawing flowers.  Kelly Barone of Whimsy by Kelly has a lovely free video series on FB on doing this.  I think she began it last year but I'm just able to focus on it now.  It was fun to try.

Below you can see all the stages, from line drawing to shading to this result directly below.

Oh my gosh.  The last time I got to draw was May 5th.  Way, WAY too long for me.  Last night I finally got back to it and it felt sooooo good.

I am definitely rusty, rusty, rusty.  This is overworked, and yet, I just loved every minute of doing it.  I couldn't stop after such a long time of no tangling, and that resulted in the overwork (and the lack of sleep since I didn't start the coloring until after 10 pm).  But it was worth every second for the pleasure it gave me.

Just the same sort of sigh-of-relief as when you finally get to scratch a bothersome itch.

The linework, before color was added, is on the right.

So what caused this long, long drought?  I'm teaching rug hooking in the midwest later this summer and I needed to produce multiple samples for the upcoming class.  That has been taking up all my time.  I will post the samples soon but now that they are done, I just want to get back to regular rug hooking, punching, and DRAWING. 

There will be another short delay while I finish prepping, traveling and teaching.  By September I hope to be back to a regular schedule of drawing and blogging.

In the meantime, meditation is keeping me sane and happy throughout this long summer. 

***
Meditation: Because some answers can only be found on the inner net.
                                                 – Shira Tamir

So here it is, with the colors added.  This was great fun to do.  The URL for the video is in yesterday's post, in case you want to try this yourself.

I'm using colors here I do not normally use--not sure what happened there.  I am not a "pink" person in normal circumstances but this is what came out.

Contrast it to yesterday's black & white version.

Aha, I finally begun tangling again.  I hope to be drawing soon too.

This one is not my favorite.  I'm not a fan of the way colored pencils work on printmaking paper.  But that's all I had on hand, so the grainy-ness couldn't be avoided.  Next time I'll get back to using a smooth surface for the colored pencils.

But so meditative to be tangling again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MK7Lg08UYzA if you would like to try it yourself.

Indeed, it's been awhile. 

Another round of surgery for me (nothing life-threatening), much-needed but requiring a lengthy recovery.  And I'm not done yet.  What I mean to say is, I AM done with the surgery but not anywhere near done with the recovery.

However, I've recovered enough to produce one tangle.  Just one, but my first one in two months.  That long a pause is almost unheard of for me.  I had hoped to do a lot more drawing and tangling in recovery but it hasn't yet been possible. 

The good news:  Everything is going along well, just as predicted.  I may be slow but I'm beginning to be able to "art" again.  I've also been doing some punch needle embroidery but that's not at a stage where I can show it.  Soon, i hope!  I think I have about another 6-8 weeks of recovery to go and then I hope to be back to myself.

Well that's what I do, anyway. 
What about you?

On days like this I need a comfort drink (it was -10 or -15° Farenheit last night and I heard "frost quaking" for the first time--who even knew that was a thing?  So this morning, in the -5° weather, I treated myself to a good old DD coffee (and added mocha, so hot chocolate). 

Oh, the comfort.

Then I drew it. 

And finally I ran the drawing thru an iPhone app.

Voilà.

Interesting how plans go awry.  For a couple of days I've been thinking about the old tangle, "Quandary."  But I haven't drawn it in years and couldn't remember how.  Today I grabbed some drawing tools and a tan 3-Z tile and gave it a go despite not remembering, and this was the result.  It sure ain't Quandary--what the heck is it?  Just some sort of pattern, with escapees in the lower left corner.

But what fun to do.  Brainless drawing--just what I love!  Nothing to think about, just filling in shapes.  Very very soothing. 

And just as in life, it didn't turn out as planned.  But it turned out fine, anyway.

I began this tile yesterday, at a late night workshop where everyone else was doing symbolic and pictorial drawings within a circular border and no one else was doing Zentangle® other than me.  Given the purpose of the workshop, I think the NON-Zentangle drawings were a better idea (see the Mandala Secrets technique, which has nothing to do with tangling and is extremely interesting--I test-drove it several years ago and enjoyed it but it's not what I want to be doing just now). 

Memory is such a tricky business.  At this time of year I like to look backwards as well as forwards.  "Liminal" was the title of my last post, and I am still there, in liminality.  Doorways are the perfect illustration of that--they are transitional places.

I made this drawing 9 years ago today and just saw it again.  I have no memory of what I was thinking when I drew it--it's probably a drawing from a photograph of an actual doorway somewhere. 

Only after I'd pasted it in here did I notice the small question mark at the bottom of the drawing.  What did I mean by that?

“The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind.”
― Kiran Desai

Drawn by me yesterday, and hugely relaxing to do!  I think it's been years since I used my Rainbow Lead Pencil--check out previous posts on the Rainbow Lead by looking in the right-hand column at the Categories section (scroll down and you'll see that category; click there to find the previous posts). 

I have missed using it.  Disorganization meant I couldn't find it for quite a while but I'm getting more organized and located my itty-bitty-stub of the original Rainbow Lead as well as a newer one.

What I love about the Rainbow Lead pencil is that you can try to manage it, but you really can never guarantee 100% what color is going to come out of the tip.  I've learned to figure some of it out, but it still surprises me and I love that.  It forces me to respond more creatively.  In this case, it meant I somehow ended up with less color than usual, and that was fine.  I like the opalescent look of this mandala.

Here are 2 more photos.  In the first I was in the middle of the line work, and in the second I had finished and lined up all my tools (you can see the nearly-used-up stub of my original Rainbow Lead pencil there; I have to use a ""pencil extender to use the last bit of it.

Drawing this led to surprise after surprise with the colors.  I love that!

Earlier this week I had the chance to go to zenAgain 2022, a class for Certified Zentangle® Teachers (CZTs) in Newport Rhode Island.  And oh what a great time we had.  This was a new tangle from headquarters, one of several they taught.  I believe it's named after Martha's son Wyatt.  I'm not sure I am done with this one yet, but I'm posting it for now. 

We stayed at a hotel on an island just off the coast of the town and the view of the ocean from my window was magnificent.  But having several days in a row to do nothing but draw and see wonderful art by others was the best part.