My Zenduo Adventure... or... It Takes 2 to Tangle

"Miracles sometimes come in pairs."     Unknown

I've decided to undertake a little Zentangle adventure. No, let me restate that... a BIG Zentangle adventure. I'll explain. I use Evernote to catalog all of the pattern step-outs that I like. I find it's a great system where I can search for a particular pattern, I can tag them with descriptive words, I can order them in different ways. Right now I have 343 patterns in my Evernote "notebook."  Most of them I have used and love, or at least like enough to want to use again.  However, there are a fair number that I've added to my list but haven't tried yet for whatever reason. 

So... I've decided to start at the beginning (in alphabetical order) and I'm going to tangle using two at a time. The first pair, then the next, and on and on for all 343 patterns (which is an odd number, but by the time I get through them all I'm sure I will have added some more.) No more than two at a time, but embellishments will be allowed. I enjoy using just two tangles at a time so that it doesn't get too busy looking. The challenge will be somehow making the two work together even when I would never in a million years think of pairing them up. Some will be easy and others not so much. 

The other challenge will be seeing this adventure to the end and making it through all 343+ patterns before giving up. That's more than 170 tiles/ZIAs. I'm not going to pressure myself to do one every day, or even every other day, so this could turn into a very l-o-n-g  adventure. I've decided to call the pieces I create Zenduos and will refer to this as my Zenduo adventure.

So without further ado, I present to you my first two Zenduos. Here is the first tile before I tangled it, a background I made with Dylusion paints.

The first two patterns in my collection are 4 corners (numbers come before letters in alpha order) and Abeko.

Here's the tile after I added a little pencil shading.

For the next one I chose to work on a black tile, which I don't do very often. The next two patterns were African Artist and All Boxed Up. Lots of lines in this one. And some shading with the zenstone. Not too happy with my African Artist here, as I can never seem to get the squinched parts to look right. One thing this project will do for me is help to weed out the patterns that I don't like enough... or can't do well enough... to keep them in my collection. This may be one of them.

So there you have it, my first two Zenduos. Anyone out there want to challenge themselves to go on a similar adventure with me?

All Boxed Up

"Not to be boxed in, to be able to transcend boundaries: for an artist, it's essential."  Sahahzia Sikander

Back with another Diva challenge. This week it's a UMT (Use My Tangle), and the tangle is Alice Hendon's All Boxed Up. If you're not familiar with it, you can check it out here, on Alice's blog. It's a straight line tangle, and as you know from my last post, I love straight line tangles. I've been meaning to try this one for a while, so I thank the Diva for the push that made me do it. I combined three sections of All Boxed Up with a little bit of Flux. I used a Micron 01 pen to tangle but thought the Flux got a little lost in there, so I went over it with an 08 pen to make it stand out a bit more.

I decided to add just a bit of color behind the Flux to make it pop out even more. 

And then a bit more color to the centers of the "boxes". 

You probably all think I used my pastel pencils (AGAIN) to add the color, but you're wrong. This time I used two shades of green Tombow markers. I'm real happy with the way this looks, and I'm pretty confident that you'll be seeing some more of All Boxed Up in my future Zentangles. Thanks, Alice, for this simple but very interesting straight line pattern!