Betweed is My Favorite!!

I have had only a little time this week but I love, love, love Betweed so I had to do one piece! I did listen to the first meditation, but I was so tired I ended up falling asleep.  So here is my entry for this weeks guest Diva challenge, one little sad entry...

I must go back to grading and I think I might just go to bed early tonight so I am ready for my meeting all day tomorrow - yes, on a Saturday. Totally unfair!(don't feel too bad, I will have lots of opportunity to doodle which is almost as good as really being able to concentrate on drawing)

Undulating challenge.

How could I NOT take the opportunity to do a challenge in which we were to use 'undulating' patterns? It is such an enticing word! and I love tangles like that SO much. Especially Meringue, which is a big-time favorite of mine. So, instead of what I should do (I am the worlds best procrastinator!), I sat down with a few delicious blue scraps of card stock and set to work. This is what came out the other end of the pen (and blue and green and white colored pencils).

Free form version of Meringue

a more grid like version which kind of began with Cadent

I also decided to go ahead and make the alterations to the second zendalla from last week's challenge entry because the more I looked at it the more it was clear it could be enhanced. So, if you are curious, I added the altered version to that post. Head on over using the link and check it out.

Now I really suppose I should go do what I am supposed to be doing... or maybe I can get distracted by something else along the way... like my pillow!

Run-by posting; teacher style

Week two of school down. One student in this house is getting settled into his new school (he is a teenager so I don't get much from him one way or another), one is ecstatic about his new school situation (6th grade accelerated classes and all that comes with it - I think he is happy to shed the restrictions and dullness of elementary school) and the youngest seems to be happy at school, but also seems to be sick with something... great, the elementary germ parade begins. At least she is happy laying around reading her new Kindle (birthday gift) and if she gets tired of that there is the huge stack of books she checked out from the library with her very own library card yesterday.

We spent last night eating dinner and watching a movie as a family and that meant drawing time for me. So I pulled out the Zendala template for the Diva guest challenge this week - Erin and her Zendalas... how their regular appearance has been missed while she studies away for her nursing degree! Here my interpretations are...

This one did not work out as planned, but with some alteration it is growing on me. In a month I might actually like it. 

This one feels about how I wanted, I might thicken some of the flower petal lines in places to give it a bit more drama.

Edited: this is the altered version:

Earlier this week I worked on a small piece to replace the one I ruined last week that was supposed to go on the front of a card. It is done on brown paper and I am always surprised at how dramatic a change is affected by adding the white to those. I scanned it before and then after to capture the change.

Before

After

That is about all the time I have. There is, of course, grading to be done, laundry... all the usual. See you next time.

Over the summer, part 1

Greetings fellow surfers (of the net, not the ocean - I'd fall off the board for sure!). Summer has come and gone and we are back to school here in the southeast. Barbaric I know, but I will be bragging about getting out in May next spring.

I was away from the computer for about a month this summer and did a bunch of drawing on non-flat things that I will post about later. I had a moment to dig out my desk and scan a few flat things this morning. I spent some time late in July browsing over at "A Little Lime", Helen Williams' blog and found a pattern that she does that really captured my attention and has not yet let go. It is a combination of Olb and Abundies. I am still in the 'copy it' phase and have not gotten all the way into the 'make it my own' phase with this pattern yet. I have done these a little differently, but mostly in Helen's style - which is not a bad thing - she is one of my favorite artists!

I like the color on this one

I think they qualify for Cari Sultanic's guest challenge to be "organic" a few weeks ago over at I am the Diva, but I did not have time to post them then. I also have one further down the page that I did in response to the color challenge posed by Jen Crutchfield earlier in July. I am such a blue/green person I wanted to avoid those choices so I went with a really challenging color for me, ORANGE.

spilled baked chicken juice on this one! Shoot!

I will try to snap photos of my new drawing box and the set of four coffee cups I made this summer and post them to and maybe get back to regular drawing again. I may even have some sewing to post about once a month since I am trying to have a night out once a month to go sew with some friends. That would be getting back to the roots of this blog finally! See you soon!

the un-entered Color Challenge

Use My Tangle challenge during a challenging week.

We have had some challenges this week totally unrelated to Zentangle, but having Zentangle to occupy spare minutes and let my mind take a break has been really good. The tangle for this week, All Boxed Up has many charming variations... I am not done experimenting with it yet, but these are the first two

Forgive the huge format and fuzzy photo, I am posting from an iPad (which does not always have a friendly relationship with anything Google, like Blogger) and I am no where near my scanner so fuzzy photos will have to do. The two similar sections of this next one are inspired by an absolutely mesmerizing pattern in the elevators where we are right now. I will try to add a photo of it later. This does not do it justice, believe me.



I will have some time on my hands so I may post a little more of what I have been doing if this process is no too painful. See you soon.


So this is me, trying again later since the pics did not post the first time. I went home and grabbed a different computer so more posting will certainly happen this week. Long story short, my son somehow acquired a Staph A. infection in his bloodstream that then set up shop in a couple of places in his leg bones, one of which required surgery to clean out. So we have been at the hospital a full week so far, four days of that in the ICU, with at least several more days to go on IV antibiotics. We are hoping for no more staph in the blood, keep your fingers crossed! I will post a picture of the name plate I made for his door sometime this week. Later!

Caution, curves ahead, or not!

WooHoo! School is OUT and post-planning is done (although there is always more that could be done to prep for next fall... sigh) and now I have about 10 days to clean everything that hasn't been cleaned in, well, lets just say a while and leave it at that...then we have plans! I also have 6 months worth of errands and doctor's appointments and things that are too hard to do when you are stuck in a classroom all the time. Whew! I am going to go to a friend's house on Friday to sew for a while, so that will be fun.

This week's Zentangle challenge was to use ONLY straight lines with no curves. Tough. I am all about the curvy patterns. SO this is what I came up with (thanks to LonettA for the inspiration for the white 'wash' with a black pattern on the black tile - her challenge tile from last week is awesome!).

I like that the white highlights on the Paradox make interconnecting curves... even inside a pattern that is all lines! Ha, I snuck some curves in, anyway!

I got a little creative with the Footlights pattern and squared off the parts that are usually round. The woven pattern was a make-it-up-as-you-go-along, the rest are familiar old friends. 

This one was just for fun and to let my fingers do a little curving after all those lines. Ahh! That's better! See you next week!

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