Zentangle Weekly Challenge #52 - Give

It's New Year's Eve, and I just finished a zentangle to represent the seasons of this spectacular year, in frames. It was the best of years - I retired in January, got married in April, had a fabulous vacation in the Maritimes in September, spent all seasons in my garden and have had many great hours with friends and families. Not to mention discovering Zentangles, starting to sew my owls, and taking a leaded stained glass class. Life is wonderful. I've included this in the weekly challenge, as I will give this zentangle to my husband on our first New Year's as husband and wife!

My Parliament of Owls

I started sewing owls in November.... so far I've made about 45 of them - all named, with various fabrics and a wise message. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with them (many have gone as Christmas gifts), but maybe they will be seen at various craft shows around Toronto in the spring.

Zentangle Weeekly Challenge #54 - Purple

In December I found a pretty purple Copic pen at a local art store and wanted to try doing a Zentangle with color. I also discovered that we had a box of watercolor pencils that I've never used and wanted to incorporate those. I chose the basic grid design based on something from the "Time to Tangle with Colors" book by Marie Browning, but chose different tangles to "fill". As my first try with these medium, I'm happy with the end result, but it sure points out that color, shading, perspective... all take skill and practice! This was done quite a bit before this week's challenge to do a tangle in purple, but, it's one I did with purple in mind, and I'm happy with it, so I'm going to add it to the weekly challenge. :)

Zentangle Weekly Challenge #51 - Fife

This weekly challenge was to use the tangle "Fife" and play around with it. I had a lot of fun with this once I let go and quit trying to plan it all out. I especially liked doing the diamond shapes rather than the curved edges, and the effect I got with the double row of diamonds. A very versatile tangle that I'm sure I'll use more as time goes on. This is a great exercise for those of us who are new to Zentangle - I'm going to spend more time trying to find variations for some of my favorite tangles, and the new ones I try!