Trinity and First Drafts

Tangle is Trinity by Stephanie Kiefhaber CZT. After drawing this with a brown Micron 01 I added some outer circular-type lines to the basic tangle and then colored it with General's chalk pencils of various hues. There may be graphite in there too. On a Bijou tile (2" square).

This was my first attempt with this tangle.  I actually finished this over 2 weeks ago but am just posting it now.  I found the instructions (the stepouts) so hard to follow that I tried it out on a 2" square tile in pencil first, using an eraser.  Normally, with Zentangle®, we do not "sketch out" tiles in pencil first, and we don't use erasers.  The general idea is that there are no do-overs; if we screw up in life, we don't get to do whatever-it-was over.  Instead, we have to figure out what to do about it and we often learn the most through dealing with our mistakes.  And so it is in art as well.

However, sometimes if we can't even envision how to approach something, a draft (ie, using pencil to try to sketch something out) is helpful as we try to map the thing in our minds.  That was my approach here.  And occasionally in life, too, if I'm finding a life task overwhelming.

Speaking of overwhelm, I have hopelessly over-committed myself and am not pleased that I barely have time to turn around in my schedule.  At my age, I should know better.  This is a mistake I make frequently in life, and I have learned a lot from it...but apparently I still haven't learned how to avoid doing it.

Consequently I have done no tangling since my last post--too busy with textile work which I'm not ready to show yet.  And with several other projects, including creating a new website for a group.  I love everything I'm doing but I really miss tangling.

As long as the world is turning and spinning, we're gonna be dizzy and we're gonna make mistakes. (Mel Brooks)

Why do we say something is out of whack? What is a whack? (George Carlin)