White on Black and other color adventures

Greetings from the sunny side of the end of the spring semester! School is out for the kids and I have only two more days of post-planning before MY summer begins... I survived the first year of teaching! And most importantly so did my family, and all of my students (some of them just barely!). A few of my students will be, shall we say, revisiting physics again sometime before graduation, but it was largely of their own doing - or NOT doing as the case may be. I did my best by them and just like in many other aspects of life, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take.

So this week's Zentangle challenge was to use white on black or tangle on something unusual...

I happened to have some black card stock and I have been getting really comfortable with my white gel pen lately doing drawings on brown paper, so I went for the white on black. I actually used a pencil to shade the white shapes a bit, and a white pencil to do some 'shadowing' as well. I chose tangles that began with A (Arc Flower), B (Beadlines), C (Chemistry), D (Drupe) and F (Frickle)  as I was in the middle issuing grades and it seemed appropriate to get all those letter together for a little party.

I received a very nice visit today from a parent of a student that I spent some time with this semester coaching through some rough patches with the material. She expressed her gratitude for my attentions and told me that I had made a difference in his attitude and enthusiasm and confidence in himself. I was so glad that she shared that with me. I have had perhaps more than my fair share of really wonderful teachers in my time and thinking that maybe someday I could be that teacher for some student was an inspiring thought as I have gone through the process of becoming a teacher. Her contention that I have had such a positive effect on this student as a first year teacher is more than I could hope for.

I wrote a couple of teacher thank you notes for my own children's teachers this week. As a way to make them special I included these little pieces on the front of each card. I am really liking drawing on the brown paper. I need to find some that color that is a little better quality than the kraft colored  card stock I am using. It is a little coarse and soaks up the ink a little more than I would like which slows down the strokes and makes them wider than I would like in places where I pause.

I have another exciting thing to share... I received in the mail today my copy of the Cloth Paper Scissors Zendoodle Workshop Summer 2015 magazine to which I contributed two technique articles. There are some really wonderful things in this magazine and I had a great time paging through it for the first time.

http://www.interweavestore.com/zen-doodle-workshop-summer-2015

I also heard from the publisher of the book I was in last year that they have taken some of that artwork and put together an adult 'coloring book' that will come out in June. That should be interesting, not exactly how I intended that art to be used, but if it gives someone some pleasant, creative time then I am happy with it. I haven't seen it anywhere but on-line yet and it will be a few days before it is available I think.

http://www.northlightshop.com/zen-doodle-coloring-book?utm_source=email&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=cmm-kjc-bl-150521