ROSE OF THE WINDS

PHOTO CREDIT: Cliparts.co

I've recently learned that an old name for a Compass Rose was "Rose of the Winds."  I love that title. 

What is a Compass Rose?  It's what you see in the picture here, something we're all familiar with--the face of a compass.

Compasses have been used for over 2000 years.  Because of their shape and the "petals" formed by the intermediate directions, the word "rose" was attached to drawings of compasses almost instantly.  I think of all the gorgeous medieval illustrations I've seen, and of the old quilt patterns called Mariner's Compass.

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Here's a medieval version below, and just under that, a "solar compass rose."  (These illustrations are from Lunagirl's store on Etsy.  She has quite a nice variety of inexpensive digital images on there.)

Photo Credit for this and the photo just below: Lunagirl's Etsy shop, URL in the paragraph above.

I don't know if that solar illustration above was intended to be a "compass rose" as its original purpose, but it works perfectly.

Anyhoo...

Sunday I was at Kate Lamontaigne's wonderful store, the Kamala Boutique.  Kate is another CZT who frequently teaches Zentangle® and other art workshops. 

I'm just not tangling or drawing enough, and so I will often sign up for a workshop with another teacher, because then I have committed to sitting down and doing something I love--tangling.  I go through periods where I'm working on another type of art project and that's all I can manage to do; I can't seem to work on more than one type of art at a time.  Since I'm obsessed with getting my current rug design done (see my immediately previous posts) I needed to make myself step away from the rug project and take time to tangle. 

Time for a workshop with Kate!

This was the Compass Rose workshop.  I had taken it once before in the spring, but I know these experiences are never the same.  The version I took in the spring was two hours long.  It was fabulous, and too short.  The version I took on Sunday was five hours long, and guess what?  Too short again!  As Kate said later, "This could be an all-day retreat."  Sign me up.

So here is what I did, below.  First, the actual finished piece.  Then, I'll post two iPhone app versions of it.  And the very last illustration is the piece that I did at the same workshop (shorter version) last spring.

The actual original, finished this afternoon. Colors are slightly off (the background paper is actually a pronounced green, just to give you idea of the level of color distortion).

Playing with a new app on my iPhone

Another version from the same iPhone app, different screen)

And for contrast, below is the version I did in May, only  3 months ago.  The instructions were exactly the same, but to paraphrase Heraclitus,
"You can never step into the same river twice."

(Colors have been altered by one of my iPhone apps, just for variation from the May original--but the shape itself is unaltered)