Tangled Tuesday No. 9: Canada Day Edition!

Happy Canada Day to my fellow Canadians! It was rather nice that the holiday fell on a Tuesday this year, combining with my usual Monday off to give me a whole bunch of free time – a four day weekend, if you please! – to ease myself back into tangling after a break to prepare for and visit with our houseguests. My creativity is a bit creaky from disuse, so I’m still not back up to my usual pace – but I’ll get there! In the meantime, I have plenty of new stuff to share, so I hope you enjoy today’s Tangled Tuesday post. 🙂

Tangling Goodies

In all the excitement of having visitors, I completely forgot to mention in last week’s post the delightful little bag of tangling goodies my sister brought as a gift from my family – some of my favourite black Pigma Micron pens, a rainbow of coloured Pigma Micron pens, and several blending stumps in various sizes. Talk about spoiled! These treats will definitely be put to good use over the next months.

A word about blending stumps. If you haven’t yet discovered these wonderful little tools, you are totally missing out and should remedy this ASAP! I love the entire tangling process, but one of my favourite parts is when it comes time to do the shading. Effective shading takes a flat drawing and tricks the eye into seeing it as three-dimensional – a little bit of magic, if you ask me. Of course, you can always use your finger to blend the pencil shading, but I find blending stumps to be far more effective. For one, they’re cleaner (less chance of unintentionally smudging my drawings with grimy graphite-covered hands), plus they allow for far more precision and detail in small areas than my stubby fingertips ever could. I swear by blending stumps (just in case you couldn’t tell)!

I mentioned in a previous Tangled Tuesday post that I’d ordered some Ten Thousand Tangles business cards from Moo. Well, they arrived this week (speedy delivery!), and I couldn’t be happier with them.

Aren’t they pretty?! (Am I allowed to say that about my own work?!) I’m looking forward to handing them out and talking tangling at BlogHer ’14… hopefully these little cards will do their job and, eventually, pay for themselves.

New Tangles

This week I learned Cubism, Daisy Beads, Dandelion Seeds, Droplets, Etcher, and Flake, all from Joy of Zentangle. (If you’re following along in Joy of Zentangle you might notice that I’ve been skipping a few of the designs. This isn’t because I didn’t like or want to do them, but because I’ve previously learned them through one of my other books. As I mentioned in an earlier post, there is often overlap and some repetition between the various Zentangle®¹ books.)

Tangling-in-Progress

I am STILL working on designing the letter G in my alphabet series – in fact, I didn’t even touch it once this week! Here’s hoping I can get to it – and FINISH it – in the days to come… and then move on to the other letters.

Finished Projects

My first priority was to design a bookmark for a sponsor.

ZIA Bookmark 7

I’m happy with how it turned out, and I hope she likes it too!

On a whim, I thought I’d try my hand at tangling a Canadian flag in honour of Canada Day. Though the end result looks fairly simple, it actually took the better part of an afternoon to complete. Fun project!

ZIA 20 – A Tangled Flag. Happy Canada Day!

Coming Soon

This week’s tangling goals include:

• Photograph my previously-completed set of four Zendalas and set up listings to sell the originals in my as-yet-to-be-opened Etsy store. (Yes, I know this was on my list previously… and yes, I DID add it to my Filofax last week… but it still didn’t get done and has been brought forward to this week. Sigh. Hopefully I’ll have something new to report next time!)
• Carry on with my Zenletter collection.
• Continue adding products to Ten Thousand Tangles.
• Create pieces for new sponsors.

P.S.

Previous posts in this series are all tagged Tangled Tuesday.

For background on how I discovered and got involved in Zentangle, and links to further information and resources, check out my blog post For the love of tangling.

You can browse my entire tangle gallery at Ten Thousand Tangles.

And, if you’re interested in having a little piece of my art for yourself, please click on the GoFundMe button below for more information and also visit my Zazzle shop Ten Thousand Tangles. (Pssst… links to my international Ten Thousand Tangles shops are in the Alphabet Salad sidebar – just click on the appropriate flag and you’ll get to the place you need to be!)

¹ The Zentangle® Method was created by Rick Roberts and Maria Thomas and is copyrighted. Zentangle® is a registered trademark of Zentangle, Inc. Learn more at zentangle.com.