Day 6 and I only finished Inktober #2…

Spheres with Disc Inktober Zentangle #2 featuring cadent, gneiss with purk and paradox, kozy, cruffle and black pearls.

It is day six and I only just finished my second tile.I’m full of excuses. It really boils down to not finding a groove yet. I have a hard time taking time to do my own things when DH is around and he has every other Friday off which happened to be this week. We also are lacking in the lighting department because lamps are bulky and expensive to move across the country. With the nor’easter this weekend and 11 straight days of cloudy skies things were just overall very dark in our apartment despite an abundance of windows. I’m also just slow. I laugh whenever I read that Zentangle is a 15 minute process. I don’t even get all the patterns inked in 15 minutes when I know all of them well. Then on Saturday I was felled with some sort of odd malady which I was still cautiously recovering from on Sunday.  I still don’t know what the cause may have been. Too much gluten?

This tile is a prime example of shading saving the day. I freehanded all the circles so things are wonky and I am way out of practice on spherical grids and cadent so when I started there I was already quite unhappy with the results before moving on to the gneiss/paradox/purk tangleation. I kept at it a bit adding black pearls, kozy, and cruffle to the mix (see below). Some rush jobs greeted me when I logged on after my tangling and breakfast hour so any further work was stalled until this morning. I much prefer to shade in natural lighting anyway so it was probably for the best that I didn’t revisit it last evening after work. Plus it gave me that oft advantageous “distance.”

Inktober Zentangle #2 sans shading. You can see a lot of wonkiness and it is pretty uninteresting. I almost passed on doing anything more with it, thinking it unsalvageable.

The shading masks my wonky cadent and it’s definitely not round “sphere.” And overall it just brings more dynamics to the piece through the dimension and layering it creates. I think really the shading is some of what I love most about the tangling process, yet when I first started I neglected that step for a few weeks or more! So sad! As has become usual for me, I used three different leads in my shading – 3H, HB, and 3B to help develop more realistic shadows.

After yesterday’s rush jobs I’m hoping to carve out the time to at least ink a third tile today, but we’ll have to see. Then this evening is the monthly handcrafters group at my library so I *may* tangle there. I’ve brought my basic kit with me every time but always end up knitting because it seems easier to visit with others while knitting than tangling.

Kozy Zendala

 

Zendala template no. 7 from TangleHarmony.com with isochor, poke root, paradox, kozy, and pearls.

 

I’m obsessed with zendalas. I used another TangleHarmony.com template, number 7. I think I may use that same one today too. An idea for taking it in a drastically different direction has percolated in my brain this morning.

I started with the isochor “baskets” that I filled with poke root. I feel like my poke root has degraded. In reality it’s probably the whole tangling in bed thing (get your head out of the gutter!). Then I put in that central poke root branch and surrounded it with paradox. Kozy begged to be next even though I hadn’t ever done that one before. Of course the very first kozy is screamingly obvious. Then graduated pearls were the last little finishing touch.