My First Square One Play

If you haven’t yet seen the Square One Facebook group, you should check it out. I haven’t played with their focus patterns before even though I’ve been a member for over a month because they are very strict on submissions being official Zentangles and not ZIAs. Since I do most of my work on 3″ Bristol squares rather than the official 3.5″ Zentangle Tiles I’m technically doing ZIAs.

Zentangle Tile 2015-068, Focus on Bunzo for the Square One Purely Zentangle Facebook Group, with support from N’Zeppel and a Florz tangleation.

But this week I pulled out one of my few official tiles and played with the pattern of focus for the week – Bunzo.

This was my first time making a concerted effort to morph from one pattern into another. In this case, N’Zeppel into a tangleation of Florz. I think I could use some practice on that, but over all I’m quite pleased with the tile. I think I really got great dimension in my Bunzo between the sparkle and shading.

Zentangle Tile 2015-069, another Bunzo tile with support from Meet and Flux.

I enjoyed the pattern and the results so much I also used the pattern on my ZIA tile last night. I didn’t like that one so much last night.Meer ended up looking kind of eel-like I think. Then I got a bit heavy on my ornamentation of Flux. After sleeping on it I think it is growing on me. Which is pretty normal for me. The organics I whine about are now some of my favorite after time has passed.

OZAD Day 24

2015-050, “One Zentangle a Day” Day 24, featuring Striping and Zinger (labeled as Pepper Tangleation), I added some Tat, Sedgling, Ynix, Rain, Mooka, Festune, Sampson and Fescue.

More organic a today. I threw nearly every organic pattern learned so far into this one. Is the organic version of the kitchen sink the compost pile?

I still can’t get Tat down. Despite it breaking up the long continuous stroke, layering it behind things made it worse! Though putting an aura around it like Ynix helps give it a bit more structure. I am starting to like Mooka – finally. So I suppose there is hope for Tat eventually.

Does anyone have tips for Tat specifically or working with organic patterns in general?

What Life Lessons Am I Learning From Zentangle?

Zentangle 2015-047, Day 22 of One Zentangle A Day featuring Tagh and Tat with Squid, Sampson, Festune, Ynix and Fracus (variant).

I began working my way through One Zentangle a Day by Beckah Krahula about mid-January. After three weeks I was struggling with only having enough time in a day to do the exercises and not having time for personal exploration. So I took roughly a week off and am back at it as of yesterday.

I will admit it. I groaned when I saw the patterns for my first day back – organic shaped and one of them is a complex, one stroke pattern (Tat). I love the organic feeling zentangles I see on Pintrest or in blogland. I hate the organic zentangles I’ve produced. Why is that?

Also, I seem to be a short stroke pattern person. I tend to make my patterns pretty small (somewhat of a control/perfectionist issue I’m sure) and have not been a fan of the single stroke patterns I’ve attempted thus far.

I’m guessing there are some really profound things these aversions have to say about me. Care to help me decipher them?