I used to be able to draw any phase of the Moon easily from memory.  This is the Moon in Waning Crescent mode, as I've positioned it above.  (of course I could flip it around 180° so that the white "horns" point left and then it would represent exactly the opposite, but this is how I drew it--waning).  I haven't been watching the Moon as much during the last couple of years, and sure enough, I'm beginning to forget what's what.  Time to check back in with Her!

In fact, I have a series of tiles prepped as the Moon in Her various phases and I noticed confusion as I tried to put them in order this morning.  Could. Not. Do. It.  Had to resort to googling the Moon's Phases (what DID we do before smartphones?) in order to turn things the right way.  Yes, definitely time to check back in with Her daily changes.

While trying to determine exactly how long those tiles have been sitting around waiting for me to finish them, I re-discovered this (below).  If you asked me, "Have you ever drawn an elephant?"  I would have said with 100% confidence, "Nope."  But here it is.  And I drew it.  Memory is notoriously unreliable!

I based the coloring and the stars on an amazing photo I saw of a man in India riding an elephant for a spiritual celebration of some sort (to Ganesh, perhaps?).  His elephant had been covered with light blue blue dust and he or someone had painted stars all over it.  It pretty much looked like this.  I completely changed the blanket, though, and left off the man, and used a template for the outline of the elephant from Ben Kwok of Ornation Creation (he has tons of animal templates).  So this is not a copy of the photograph, not even close. I rarely tangle anything representational but my friend Julie adores elephants so I framed and gave it to her.  And I drew it exactly 7 years ago today.  A lot has happened in that time--she got married and now has a lovely little boy.  I'm betting the elephant picture is somewhere in her house, maybe even in his room.

Finally, since I've been on a Moon kick, yesterday I had fun with a Zendala I'd prepped with a watercolor wash a long time ago.  Just playing with the tangle Ibex.  I started off like the photo on the left and then somehow ended up like the photo on the right.  Not my best work but oh boy did I have fun playing.

Really, it is the same tile, just taken on 2 different backgrounds under different light conditions and clearly I'd done more drawing in the version on the right.  Still, when you look at the color differences, it's hard to believe it is the same tile.  I think I prefer the one on the left, before I overdid the work on it.  Live and learn.

Ah--I just heard that Queen Elizabeth has died. I know she was still working as recently as the day before yesterday, when she greeted the new PM.  Talk about taking to a role in life with utter dedication--how serious she was about it!  She wasn't perfect, but she was wonderful anyway.  She was born to become an archetype, and perfectly lived the role.  Go in peace, Lady.

This is part of a project I began years ago in a workshop with Martha Huggins and Molly Hollibaugh.  And I do mean years ago.

It always surprises me how much better I feel on a day when I draw.  Whether the piece turns out well or not, the process is mindful and meditative.

Here's a short article on why drawing--bad or good--is loved by so many. (Many of these same points could be describing the practice of meditation.)  Count me in. 

Practice will never make perfect, but it can certainly make things better--both visually and also with my internal weather system.  If I don't practice, I can tell the difference the next time I try to draw.  This is one reason I take classes frequently.  And if I don't practice I start to feel a build-up emotionally too.  Drawing repetitive lines is incredibly soothing, calming and meditative.

Speaking of which, meditation  is the same for me.  If I don't practice, I begin to see the effects almost immediately in daily life. 

I'm just better when I practice, whether with drawing or with meditation.

Here is another version of work I did in a class with Shie Naritomi, CZT.  What a wonderful teacher.  See my comments from yesterday on the background of this work.

As one person, I cannot bring peace to Ukraine.  I cannot restore what they have lost:  lives, livelihoods, homes, family, and peace of mind.  No one person can do this alone.

But I can join with others to protest, to support.  And I can take the time to sit quietly and calm myself, so that I make wiser decisions when I protest or when I support. 

Drawing and meditation both do that for me.  So does drawing AS meditation.  The more peace and compassion I can develop within myself, the more peace and compassion I can bring into the world.  Perhaps only in small ways, but if each of us were able to do this, it would be powerful.

So I have taken the time to draw this afternoon, breathing deeply and working line by line, one line at a time.  It is calming.  It gives me courage to watch the news tonight.  Again.  To witness the inhumanity.  Again.  It gives me courage to keep protesting, to keep supporting, to keep loving, despite it all. 

Since I am on another map tangling kick, I am thinking about borders and boundaries and what happens when they are disrespected.  My heart is with all the people of Ukraine, and extends to all the other wars going on all over the planet at this moment.

“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
― Albert Einstein

A quick leftover tile from yesterday's session.

“Light is a thing that cannot be reproduced, but must be represented by something else – by color.”  --Cezanne

Watercolors:  Sooooo tricky to use.  But I love them.

How odd to be map tangling on a day when the world is experiencing one country violently overrunning another country's borders and attempting to re-write the global map by obliterating a democracy.  I had prepped the tiles for this several days ago but it wasn't until today that I realized the irony of drawing this piece at this time.

Same tile, same room, same time, different lighting.  Amazing difference.

I can never quite believe what a difference lighting makes in a photograph.

Yesterday and today I have been experimenting with using a 9-pointed star as a string for tangling.  Below is my first attempt, done with Tomomi Galliano, CZT of the Pebbles and Drops website..  And underneath that is today's try.  I like this 9-pointed mandala a lot.  Nevertheless, first tries are just that:  first tries.  I can only get better with practice, eh? 

I posted my first try at this tile two days ago here.  Today I was wanting to make a card to accompany a gift certificate for a friend and decided to use the same tile design.  I'm pleased with this and hope the recipient likes it.  I made some minor changes in the design.

See an earlier stage of this project below:

Just getting started on the coloring, after creating most but not all of the linework.

"Tenacious practice, practice, practice is crucial for excellence; rote repetition is underrated in America."
(Amy Chua)

That's one reason I don't mind doing the same thing several times over.  I know I learn best that way.

This mandala was easy to draw this morning because one of the talented artists I'd taken a class with some time ago, Annie Taylor of the Arty Zen website, emailed a private video free to all her former students as a thanks.  It was a how-to of this piece, so I gave it a try.  Very fun. 

You can see the progression above, from the linework through the finished piece.  I like this mandala pattern and can see using it for other things.  Will be trying it again.  Thank you, Annie.  It's always wonderful to get a surprise gift.

And as I'm catching up on my back-to-basics 365 Tangle challenge, here are a few more super-basic tangles from early January.  The wind is howling outdoors; how lovely to stay inside and draw.

Holy cow, this was a hard photo to take!  Two of the mandalas would look great, the third would almost disappear; I'd try again, another two would look great and the other third would disappear.  I was gnashing my teeth.  This is the best I could do.

This is part of a series of moon phase pieces.  I have moon phases on the brain right now.  I am hooking moons into my latest rug, and also working on these drawings which I began in late 2020.

My heart is like the autumn moon
perfectly bright in the deep green pool
nothing can compare with it
you tell me how it can be explained
--Han-Shan

Sometimes tired old things just need to be dressed up a bit to shine. 

Cue the comments on whether that's true for all of us!  I'm talking about things.  Ha.

This morning I found a gray tile that I'd tossed some lavender-ish watercolor on long ago, in an early attempt to map-tangle.  The color had spread out over most of the tile, with absolutely no interesting shape, and was incredibly plain.  BO-ring. 

Out came more watercolors today and I tarted it up, used my heat gun to dry it, and went to town with some of the Inktober tangles.  Better.  Every tangle except one was brand new for me.  Some of them turned out more successfully than others, so I'll re-do the ones that really didn't have enough room to show themselves off.  Perhaps that'll be the task for tomorrow.

This is what happens when I run out of black Micron 01s and still want to tangle.  Spynes, which I tried for the first time yesterday, is a really fun tangle for experimentation--I couldn't resist this second try.

The Stone House Runner is nearly done; just the usual finishing steps left.  Here it is:

A meditation on the preponderance of spirals in the cosmos.

"In a spiral galaxy, the ratio of dark-to-light matter is about a factor of ten. That's probably a good number for the ratio of our ignorance to knowledge. We're out of kindergarten, but only in about third grade."
--Vera Rubin

I enjoyed every moment of this one.  Enough said.

How many ways can a drawing go wrong?

Just watch.

I haven't laughed this hard in a long time.  Oh gosh, I started off drawing the tangle Dewd, which I have never quite grasped.  (an understatement if there ever was one)

The first thing to go wrong was that I discovered that my beloved Micron 01 was dying.  I searched for a new one, which was when I found out I did not have another 01.  What to do?  I picked up an 05 instead.  Oh dear.

That's one of the things that gives this very funny tile a look of having been drawn by Edvard Munch (the painter who created The Scream).  But wait, there's more!

Dewd is the tangle around the edges of this Zendala.  I kind-of-almost had it at first, and then totally lost it as I moved in toward the center.  At several points I thought, "Oh for Pete's sake--this is rubbish, I can't go on."  But hey, it's Zentangle®.  We always keep going and see what happens.  One line at a time.

So instead I started to laugh and plowed on.  I added another tangle in the center.  Oh my, a nice one but it didn't help.  Edvard Munch lives on.

Well hey, in for a penny in for a pound, right?  Will it help if we tart this up with color?  (no)  Out came the Silver Shadow Gellyroll pens.  These are always tricky to use as you never quite know how they will look when dry.  I followed that up with a liberal application of General's Colored Pencils in two colors.  Thus proving the saying by Oscar Wilde, "Nothing succeeds like excess."

Because despite it all, I kinda like it.  And I laughed my way all the way through, which is always fun.

The people we tend to call Huichol in Mexico (they call themselves Wixåritari, or, The People) have a long history of art.  I've admired their beadwork, small glass beads pressed into wax lining the bottoms of gourd-bowls and other objects coated with a thin layer of wax, using bright, bright colors.  Check it out at the link above.  They work in many media in addition to beadwork--textiles, paintings, et cetera. 

This tangle is based on a shape common to their culture and others.  We see it in quilting patterns everywhere, and in many other cultural contexts.  Mexican CZT Celina Bonilla Martin gave a class using the form as a template.  I decided to go with a different colorway and did my own thing.

Tangles included:  Printemps, DoDah, Wadical, Umbler, Flux, Ko'oke'o. 

What interested me was that most of the way through working on this, it looked like it was going to turn out as an epic failure on my part.  It looked horrible.  I wish I'd taken photos during the progression.  And then I began adding the tangles and it turned around.  While it may not be a masterwork on my part, I quite like it now.

How many times have I said that here, and drawn a parallel to daily life?  Trying out new things often brings on a feeling of, "Oh my god, this is never going to work," and then somehow it turns out better than expected.  And with practice, we just learn more and get better and better.  This is certainly not true in all situations in life, but it's the case far more often than not.

The critical mind is always predicting epic failures.

Just ignore it.  See what happens instead.

A repeat of yesterday's tile.  This is version 2.0 since I gave away the tile I did yesterday as a thank-you gift to a neighbor.  I realized I still wanted a version for myself and redid it, enjoying every line.

In today's version I added substantial green coloring as well as the blue, and experimented a bit with placement of patterns.  This was just as much fun as the first one.

Another "learning tile" done very quickly from an Artifex video.  This was done fast as a thank-you gift for a friend who made me a lovely dinner.  I cannot cook so cannot reciprocate, thus I wanted to draw her something as a way of expressing gratitude.

However, I needed gray-toned paper to work with, and didn't have any.  What to do?  I grabbed a white tile and threw a gray wash on it.  Et voilà--it actually worked!  I'll give it to her this evening.

Whew.  When it doubt, improvise.  Always a big life lesson for me.

So it started out this way...

I'm still "blobbing."  A great way to try out various watercolors and watercolor techniques.  These are Yatsumoto metallic watercolors.  Very subtle unless you really load your brush.

There was a teeny bit of Inktense Watercolor Pencil tangling going on in the upper left quadrant.

A kind neighbor brought these marigolds in a tiny bottle.  She collects old bottles and also grows flowers.  A wonderful combination.

I could actually have given this post a much longer title.  Something like:  "Kind Neighbors, Marigolds, and Other Favorite Things."  Too long.

Finally, a quick late-night tangle I did last night after watching Amy Kam's weekly Tangle Time.  The tile had been given a watercolor wash years ago.  I added the tangles (Gneiss, Black Pearl, Crescent Moon, Shattuck), along with colored and chalk pencils and graphite.  I threw in some white gellyroll.  And I still couldn't sleep--however I didn't wake up this morning until almost nine.  Oooh, a lovely sleep after all.  Once it actually came.

Here she is, the icon. 
The original. 
The exquisite.





But since nothing is sacred these days...

She apparently was photographed attending a party shortly after posing for Leonardo.

This is her "riotous party smile."

Uh-oh.  I know this is a sacrilege, right? 

But what fun to try.

Romi Marks had a wonderful workshop called "Zenovating the Mona Lisa," and since I'm in full-on learning-and-practice mode I wanted to take it.  My motivation actually was learning to tangle on photographs, especially on photographs with a lot of dark areas in them.  I want to try this out on pictures that I've taken, and I knew there were tips I needed to learn first.  Romi is a marvellous teacher and I learned a lot doing this.  Next I want to try some of my own photos to see what I can do.

So many art opportunities, so little time.

This was my interpretation of a well-done class by Vandana Krishna, CZT in Bengaluru, India, as a part of the Artifex series I mentioned in the last post.  While I'm not sure my version actually looks like a magnifying glass, I really enjoyed the process. 

On a night when--for no obvious reason--I simply could not get to sleep, working on this tangle was relaxing, fun, and absorbing.  I have occasional bouts of sleeplessness, and am so glad to have drawing to occupy me when it strikes.

Here's how it looked when I finished the linework, and then on the right is how it looks after adding some color and shading.  There's currently a big boo-boo in the center of the tangle (I'll probably fix it at some point), which I left in place for now.  You can see it in the large version--a misplaced black line.

I love the life lessons I constantly learn from Zentangle®.  This was another big one.  I set out to draw one thing, ended up getting hopelessly lost, and by the time I finished the preliminary linework last night and forced myself to stop and go to bed, I was looking at a hot mess.  I didn't think it could be salvaged.

But this morning I just had to keep going to see what would happen, and ended up with this--which I quite like.  [Although it does bear a resemblance to "St Patrick's Day on Steroids," don't you think?  But that's ok, I like it anyway.]

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Here are the details for you tanglers out there (no need to read this part if you don't tangle--it could be boring for you):  I fell in love with an Emiko Kaneko CZT video (HERE)* and thought I'd give it a try.  But I misunderstood what it was:  She clearly labeled the video "A Tangleation of Tissooh," but all I saw was "Tissoooh," which is a high-focus tangle by Tomas Padros CZT that I've always wanted to attempt.

Emiko made it look so easy that I was sure I could do it and learn. 

Well.  I did indeed learn, but not as she intended! 

Mine has some resemblance to hers, but I ended up with a lot of weird space in the background, and things are not in the same places as on her tile.  So did I learn a lot?  You bet.  But now I need to go back and find a simple stepout for ONLY Tissooh and have a go at that one tangle--this tile combines Tissooh with something like Bales, Tripoli, and Orbs.  However, I do love my outcome.

For years I've heard that it's lways good to learn by copying the masters, and Eri is certainly a master of this art.

For me, the biggest learning is that no matter how bad something looks, it's highly likely that it's worth it to try and save the thing.  Or as the I Ching would say: "Perseverance furthers."

*Thank you to Susie Ngamsuwan for catching the fact that I'd attributed this tile and video to the wrong CZT.  Wow, much appreciated.

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Note:  I've been doing a LOT of copying lately, along with watching videos and going along with them.  I always credit people as I'm copying.  I'm on a mission to learn from a wide variety of tanglers whose skills I admire, and if that means I am copying for awhile, that's ok.  It's a powerful way to practice.

Here are three quotes about copying as an effective tool in learning art:

It would have been the equivalent of Jackson Pollock's attempts to copy the Sistine Chapel. (Malcolm Cowley)

But Shakespeare's magic could not copied be;
Within that circle none durst walk but he. (John Dryden)

If my students seem to copy me when they are learning, that is good. It shows they are listening and trying to do what I tell them. They will develop their own style soon enough. (William Draper)

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Finally, I took these two photos only one minute apart.  The first one, on the left, was taking on a white background in indirect daylight.  The second one--using the same camera with no setting changed--was taken a minute later on the blue background and in direct sunlight.  WOW--look at the difference!  It might as well be two different pieces, but it isn't.  Isn't that incredible!  It never fails to amaze me how light and a different color in the background can make the same thing look totally different.

PS:  The one on the left is the actual coloring of the tile.