Inktober Tangles - Day 10 - Zenith by Zentangle I’ve drawn Zenith many times, but never before as a monotangle. This time, I wanted to take the opportunity to draw it much larger than I normally do, and to make it “fancy”. It was fun to figure out what I wanted to do with each area of exploration offered, but still stay with the basic idea of the original tangle.
Random string. Random and selected tangles. This tile started with the string. When it was drawn, I really hoped I got a tangle from the random draw that would fit well in that ribbon area at the upper right. I didn’t, so I decided to put Zenith there. Other than that, the rest of the tangls here appeared in the random tangle selection. I like the mix of botanical and line tangles. Some of these I haven’t drawn in a while, so they were fun to do. I particularly enjoyed drawing Petal Puddle!
Another tile from Eni Oken's Crazy Gold Auraknot lesson! I am making progress with the lesson. Here, I’ve added the designs to the stripes of the tangle. I stuck with the black and white because I just wanted to get a feel for how to do it. I’ll finally be using metallic ink on the next one! Zentangle drawn on Strathmore Vellum Bristol using a black, Micron pen. Shading done with graphite pencil, colored pencil and copic markers.
Embellishment. This Zentangle came from watching a video published by Sakura of America in which Molly begins with the tangle Zenith and then embelished it. The end result was this fabulous diagonal design that looked like the hem of a beautiful skirt! I pretty much followed the video exactly until the end of the tangling part. There, I added the Ruflz tangle to the upper, left side because I felt it needed something more. I followed the shading in the video to some extent, but I used different tools. Instead of the regular pencil, I used Copic Markers and a black colored pencil. I did my highlights slightly differently, and used white colored pencils.
Classic. When I was drawing this Zentangle, I realized that it was becoming just way too complicated and busy. Even while I was shading it with the brown pencil, I knew I would have to do something to bring back some high contrast, or it would just be a really muddy tile. At first I was thinking I could add gold, metallic ink. But that really wouldn’t pop enough here. The center of the Arukas reminded me of a gem, and then the light bulb lit up: turquoise.
Elemental. This is the first Zendala I have ever drawn. A Zendala is a mandala created using tangles. I have never done one before because I was so worried about it being perfect. However, after watching Eni’s Radial Zendala video , I understand that it was OK to create something that was “perfectly imperfect”. I was still very nervous about tackling this, but I had a concept in mind of creating a Zendala that would represent the basic elements: Air, Earth, Fire and Water. I knew some of the tangles that I wanted to use, but I also allowed the design to evolve and grow on it’s own, too.